A dual biography reveals women’s trailblazing roles in aviation.
Spaceflight historian Teitel (Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA, 2016), who was an embedded journalist with the New Horizons mission to Pluto team in 2015, brings considerable excitement and knowledge about U.S. space programs to her close look at the life and career of two pioneering women pilots: Jackie Cochran (1906-1980) and Jerrie Cobb (1931-2019). At the start of her career, Cochran fought to be taken seriously, facing down men who tried to discourage her. The winner of multiple awards for her flying prowess, she was the only female entrant in the 1937 Bendix race, which added “a new women’s cross-country speed record” to her accomplishments. In 1938, she was named “First Lady of the Air Lanes.” At the start of World War II, she established the Women’s Flying Training Detachment, a precursor to the Women Airforce Service Pilots program, instituted at 120 Air Force bases, where women pilots tested planes, flew simulated operations, and flew cargo, weapons, and personnel around the country. Cochran directed the WASP program and flew bomber planes during the war. She also became a war correspondent for a magazine that her wealthy and doting husband bought to facilitate her overseas assignments. In 1956, Cochran lost a congressional bid, but she used her celebrity and money to support women’s training as aviators. Cobb, a generation younger, confronted the same prejudice against women pilots that Cochran faced. A NASA administrator who opposed a female astronaut program once described himself as “one of the old school” in favor of keeping women “barefoot and pregnant.” Nevertheless, Cobb proved as ardent as Cochran, submitting herself as a test subject for astronaut training, recruiting other women pilots, and lobbying with NASA director James Webb to admit women as astronauts. Cobb faced opposition not only from NASA, but also from Cochran, who adamantly opposed women’s astronaut training; wielding her high-level political connections (Lyndon Johnson was a friend), she saw Cobb’s efforts quashed.
A well-researched contribution to women’s and aviation history.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1604-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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