Well-written and intelligent: a must for aviation buffs, and convincing back-up for Charles Lindbergh’s appreciative comment...
Detailed and absorbing memoir by the engineer who led Boeing’s development of the world’s most commercially successful airplane.
Not that anyone saw it that way when 44-year-old Sutter was offered the job of overseeing the 747 in 1965. Boeing’s hottest engineers and designers were tied up with the 2707, a supersonic plane that was expected to be the future of commercial aviation. But in the meantime, Pan Am wanted a really big jet for its increasing number of intercontinental passengers. Sutter had 28 months, two-thirds the usual amount of time, to design, build and deliver a plane “two and a half times bigger than anything in existence.” His nearly blow-by-blow account offers fascinating insights into Boeing’s internal politics and the power wielded by important customers like Pan Am chairman Juan Trippe. The 747 had public-relations problems from the moment Sutter decided that a single-deck, wide-body fuselage better served the aircraft’s safety requirements and its secondary purpose as a freight carrier: Trippe wanted a double-decker, and Boeing senior management wanted to make him happy. But Sutter’s philosophy, persuasively reiterated throughout his memoir, was that his job was to find the best engineering solution and make the client see that it was best. “If you don’t have the courage to face up to difficult situations—and that includes making sure unwelcome truths are heard and acted on,” he writes, “then you have no business being a chief engineer.” Readers will hope that today’s aerospace executives share the devotion to excellence and safety above all that Sutter displays throughout. (He was appalled by NASA’s cavalier attitude when he served on the panel investigating the Challenger disaster.) Despite his onetime maverick status at the company, the 85-year-old retiree is a Boeing man through and through, understandably proud of the manufacturer’s sterling record and candid about failures like the never-produced 2707.
Well-written and intelligent: a must for aviation buffs, and convincing back-up for Charles Lindbergh’s appreciative comment that the 747 was “one of the great ones.”Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-088241-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Smithsonian/Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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