by Joe Sutter with Jay Spenser ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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