An overlong but still worthy aviation history.
A history of the obsessive pioneers of flight.
Bestselling historian Rose (Men of War: The American Soldier in Combat at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima, 2015) emphasizes that when the Wright brothers made the first heavier-than-air flight in 1903, airships had been carrying passengers since the Montgolfier brothers first launched their balloon in 1783. Until well into the 1930s, many entrepreneurs believed that dirigibles—spacious, quiet, capable of flying long distances—were the wave of the future compared with cramped, noisy, accident-prone propeller-driven craft. After a brief account of a successful 1936 flight of the Hindenburg, “the ultimate transoceanic cruiser” that would be destroyed in a spectacular crash just a year later, Rose rewinds the clock to 1863, when German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838-1917) first flew in a balloon and was inspired. After retirement, he devoted himself to building powered airships, immense craft lifted by flammable hydrogen (helium, much safer, was wildly expensive). He created the world’s first commercial airline in 1909. The difficulty of control in bad weather and the danger of hydrogen proved to be insoluble problems. Airships suffered a dismal safety record, although Zeppelin’s passenger airline, under his successor, led a charmed life until the Hindenburg disaster. Rose’s intriguing second subject does not appear until the author reaches the 1920s, when Juan Trippe (1889-1981) joined other businessmen investing in the first airlines. As the author shows, the competition in the U.S. was already cutthroat, but few airlines existed south of the border, and he began acquiring exclusive rights to fly to the Caribbean and later South America. Flush with profits—from airmail contracts; passengers came later—he persuaded Boeing to develop a flying boat capable of crossing the ocean. The resulting “clippers” became the epitome of glamorous air travel during the 1930s. By 1940, when the book ends, Trippe’s Pan American World Airways was the world’s largest international carrier, and the Zeppelin was history. Technical and business details dominate the narrative, but the primary story is often riveting.
An overlong but still worthy aviation history.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8997-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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