Max -- nobody ever calls him ""Mr. Conrad"" -- was just old and young enough in 1927 to catch a bad case of Lindbergh fever. And not surprisingly, the youthful Conrad had his own plane, a Laird Swallow, exactly a year after the Spirit of St. Louis landed on French soil to the exuberant cheers of millions. After that the man from Winona, Minnesota, never looked back -- only up and beyond the next cloud -- flying with such private dedication that he set numerous single-pilot endurance and distance records (e.g., Casablanca to El Paso in 56+ hours -- ""All his life, things he had done best were the things best done alone""), all despite crack-ups, a fire which nearly wiped him out in the early '40's, and an awful propeller accident which crushed part of his skull and sliced into the brain, leaving his speech permanently impaired but not his ability to fly. Mrs. Buegeleisen, an aviator herself and contributor to Flying magazine, tells Max Conrad's life story simply and chronologically but with the measured empathy of one who knows the pleasures and perils of the cockpit firsthand.