While personal-flight prototypes edge from pipe dream to purchase order, this well-documented history provides a satisfying...
A sapid look into the historically futile attempts to develop a gravity-defying, single-person flying machine.
Personal air flight, independent from conventional planes and unwieldy hot air balloons, has been pondered by hopeful inventors for centuries, writes Lehto (Chrysler’s Turbine Car: The Rise and Fall of Detroit’s Coolest Creation, 2010, etc.). Challenged by the heretofore impossibility of achieving lasting stability while airborne, a great many scientists, inventors and hopeful aeronautical specialists have tried and been mostly unsuccessful. The author applauds many of these creative efforts while charting the jet pack’s fascinating evolution. The experimental designs and concepts are legion and include 1940s military engineer Charles Zimmerman’s propellered “flying shoes,” a device that opened the floodgates for more progressive ideas like Stanley Hiller Jr.’s kinesthetic twin-engine–powered platform and aircraft engineer Wendell Moore’s innovative, hydrogen peroxide–fueled rocket belt backpack. All saw their dreams rise and eventually plummet, some with tragic outcomes. Tweaked innovations on Moore’s concept continued for decades, with each milestone, from pump hoses to overhead airscrews, improving on the prototype before it, yet issues with safety and flight duration stifled progress. Grounded with an academic tone, Lehto’s chapters are rife with technical processes and jargoned commentary wisely tempered with graphic illustrations and photographs, which comprehensively chronicle the unique and choppy legacy of jet-propulsion devices. Though drier than Mac Montandon’s Jetpack Dreams (2008), Lehto’s approach should appeal to armchair inventors and basement tinkerers.
While personal-flight prototypes edge from pipe dream to purchase order, this well-documented history provides a satisfying substitution.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61374-430-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
