In "Island in the Sky," Ernest K. Gann, veteran airline transport pilot, tells a story that transmits the feelings, the thoughts, the impulses of men who come alive in the stratosphere. It possesses the understatement of individuals who need no words to explain actions, the poetry of airborne creatures who know the fulfillment of release from the earth.

Mr. Gann's story is concerned with the flight of Dooley and the forced landing of his plane, the "Corsair," in the uncharted frozen wastelands of northern Canada. It is concerned with the kind of man Dooley was and the kind of men who, without question, assumed the perilous task of finding him and his crew….

It is not in the description of flight alone, of flying above clouds, through clouds and beneath them that Mr. Gann excels. On their frozen lake in the midst of nowhere six men waited for...