An overlong but still worthy aviation history.
A history of the obsessive pioneers of flight.
Bestselling historian Rose (Men of War: The American Soldier in Combat at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima, 2015) emphasizes that when the Wright brothers made the first heavier-than-air flight in 1903, airships had been carrying passengers since the Montgolfier brothers first launched their balloon in 1783. Until well into the 1930s, many entrepreneurs believed that dirigibles—spacious, quiet, capable of flying long distances—were the wave of the future compared with cramped, noisy, accident-prone propeller-driven craft. After a brief account of a successful 1936 flight of the Hindenburg, “the ultimate transoceanic cruiser” that would be destroyed in a spectacular crash just a year later, Rose rewinds the clock to 1863, when German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838-1917) first flew in a balloon and was inspired. After retirement, he devoted himself to building powered airships, immense craft lifted by flammable hydrogen (helium, much safer, was wildly expensive). He created the world’s first commercial airline in 1909. The difficulty of control in bad weather and the danger of hydrogen proved to be insoluble problems. Airships suffered a dismal safety record, although Zeppelin’s passenger airline, under his successor, led a charmed life until the Hindenburg disaster. Rose’s intriguing second subject does not appear until the author reaches the 1920s, when Juan Trippe (1889-1981) joined other businessmen investing in the first airlines. As the author shows, the competition in the U.S. was already cutthroat, but few airlines existed south of the border, and he began acquiring exclusive rights to fly to the Caribbean and later South America. Flush with profits—from airmail contracts; passengers came later—he persuaded Boeing to develop a flying boat capable of crossing the ocean. The resulting “clippers” became the epitome of glamorous air travel during the 1930s. By 1940, when the book ends, Trippe’s Pan American World Airways was the world’s largest international carrier, and the Zeppelin was history. Technical and business details dominate the narrative, but the primary story is often riveting.
An overlong but still worthy aviation history.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8997-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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