With stirring detail and perceptive insight about the pilots and the public, Jackson recaptures the tone and tenor of a...
A talented storyteller re-creates the signature moment of aviation’s golden age.
By the spring of 1927, the technology, money and pool of design and piloting talent had reached a critical mass. Clearly someone would soon fly from New York to Paris nonstop and capture the $25,000 Orteig Prize, unclaimed since 1919. By then World War I had transformed the image of aviators from eccentric flying fools to dashing “knights of the air.” The Jazz Age publicity machine, newly augmented by radio and newsreels, prepared to catapult to unprecedented fame whoever crossed the Atlantic first. Notable candidates included the Italian Francesco de Pinedo, Frenchmen René Fonck, Charles Nungesser and François Coli, Americans Charles Levine, Bert Acosta, Clarence Chamberlin, Noel Davis, Floyd Bennett and Richard E. Byrd, the polar explorer already accustomed to the “hero business.” And, of course, a young mail pilot and his plane, Spirit of St. Louis. The glare attending Charles Lindbergh’s triumph has all but obscured his rivals, almost every one of whom was better known, better equipped, more experienced and at least as able. Without diminishing the Lone Eagle’s achievement, Jackson (The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire, 2008, etc.) makes clear the “cult of Lindbergh” would have evaporated had he not won, and that a combination of skill, luck and the misfortunes of his competitors allowed him to survive the “Great Atlantic Derby” and relegate his competitors to footnotes. Jackson rescues the stories of these and other fliers, some of them killed, the rest severely marked by the great race. Throughout, he folds in unfailingly apt observations about the psychology of aviators, the peculiar mix of wealth and want that characterized the 1920s, the hunger for heroes, the role of chance and the turbocharging effect of mass media.
With stirring detail and perceptive insight about the pilots and the public, Jackson recaptures the tone and tenor of a frantic era’s national obsession.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-10675-1
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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