teachings become venerated rather than practiced. The birds spend all their time extolling the virtues of Jonathan and his students and spend no time flying for flying's sake. The seagulls practice strange rituals and use demonstrations of their respect for Jonathan and his students as status symbols. Eventually some birds reject the ceremony and rituals and just start flying. Eventually one bird named Anthony Gull questions the value of living since "...life is pointless and since pointless is by definition meaningless then the only proper act is to dive into the ocean and drown. Better not to exist at all than to exist like a seaweed, without meaning or joy [...] He had to die sooner or later anyway, and he saw no reason to prolong the painful boredom of living." As Anthony makes a dive-bomb to the sea, at a speed and from an altitude which would kill him, a white blur flashes alongside him. Anthony catches up to the blur, which turns out to be a seagull, and asks what the bird was doing: "I'm sorry if I startled you," the stranger said in a voice as clear and friendly as the wind. "I had you in sight all the time. Just playing...I wouldn't have hit you." "No! No, that's not it." Anthony was awake and alive for the first time in his life, inspired. "What was that?" "Oh, some fun-flying, I guess. A dive and pullup to a slow roll with a rolling loop off the top. Just messing around. If you really want to do it well it takes a bit of practice, but it's a nice-looking thing, don't you think?" "It's, it's...beautiful, is what it is! But you haven't been around the Flock at all. Who are you, anyway?" "You can call me Jon." Development Bach initially wrote it as a series of short stories that were published in Flying magazine in the late 1960s. Bach, who said the book came to him as "a visionesque spooky thing," stopped after he wrote 10 pages and didn't pick it up again for a few years. The book was rejected by several publishers before coming to the attention of Eleanor Friede at Macmillan in 1969. "I think it has a chance of growing into a long-lasting standard book for readers of all ages," she wrote presciently in her acquisition memo. She convinced Macmillan to buy it and