A comprehensive biography of the guiding hand behind naval aviation, by Trimble (History/Auburn University). Today, the US Navy's air force plays a vital role in protecting American interests throughout the world, but it took the efforts of stubborn visionaries to win acceptance of idea of the offensive capabilities of air power. Chief among the Navy's visionaries was Rear Adm. William A. Moffett (1869-1933), head of the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics from its inception in 1921 until his death at sea in 1933, when he went down with the dirigible Akron during an Atlantic storm. At the Bureau, Moffett, using well- honed political skills, took on the forces and laws impeding the development of naval aviation: the ``battleship mentality'' of other Navy chiefs; Congressional budget-cutters; the federally mandated policy of strictly competitive bidding, which Moffett saw as a threat to the viability of the aircraft-manufacturing industry; and, most irritating to Moffett, maverick Army Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, who envisioned a unified national air force, preferably under his own command. Countering Mitchell, Moffett insisted that because of the Navy's special requirements, naval aviation must remain a part of its parent service. Fighting the Navy's own bureaucracy, he campaigned for autonomy in the selection, retention, and pay of naval aviation personnel, as well as for recognition of service in the Navy's air arm as equivalent to seagoing service. Among Moffett's successes was the development of the aircraft carrier as a major component of the US fleet; among his failures was the metal-framed, rigid, lighter-than-air airship (not to be confused with the nonrigid blimp), whose long flight endurance and high lift capability failed to outweigh its vulnerability to severe weather. An admiring life that will remind readers that there's more to naval-aviation history than Top Gun and the Tailhook scandal. (Thirty-seven b&w photographs)
Pub Date: Dec. 9, 1993
ISBN: 1-56098-320-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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