A real treat for aviation buffs, and by far the best one-volume analysis of the subject.
A superb history of flying machines, by one who should know.
Crouch, senior curator of the aeronautics division of the National Air and Space Museum, brings impeccable credentials to his task. He’s also a fine writer with an international outlook, which sets this apart from recent histories that take a US-centric view of aviation. His episodic, anecdotal narrative opens in 1908 with Orville Wright’s hour-long circling of a military parade ground outside Washington, an incident that prompted the assembled brass to wonder about the application of aircraft to warfare—and then, almost immediately, to dismiss the possibility. (Said the Secretary of War: “I just can’t see that these aeroplanes are going to be especially practical just yet.”) The brothers Wright hoped, for their part, that the airplane would help bring about world peace, reducing the distance real and metaphorical between nations. Alas, Crouch observes, things didn’t quite work out that way. The author touches at many points on the relation between military and civilian developments in aircraft design and manufacture, and on the role of international figures in bringing air supremacy in both spheres to the US; the German inventor Hugo Junkers, of WWI fame, for example, designed both military and civilian aircraft, and his firm “inaugurated the age of commercial air transportation in Japan, China, Africa, and Australia” while selling plenty of its ultramodern (for the 1920s, at least) F13 aircraft to the US Post Office and military. Crouch’s pages are full of technical details and enough facts and factoids to satisfy the most demanding trivia buff. He closes on an international note, observing that by 1990 the European Airbus consortium was outselling its biggest competitor, Boeing, in “every class of airplane smaller than the 747.”
A real treat for aviation buffs, and by far the best one-volume analysis of the subject.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05767-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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