The Millionaire's Unit: The Aristocratic Flyboys Who Fought the Great War and Invented America's Air Power - Hardcover

Wortman, Marc

3.73

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9781405053846: The Millionaire's Unit: The Aristocratic Flyboys Who Fought the Great War and Invented America's Air Power

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1405053844 ISBN 13: 9781405053846

Publisher: Macmillan, 2006

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About the Author:

Marc Wortman is an award-winning freelance writer whose work has appeared in numerous national magazines. He was a senior editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine, where the story of the Yale unit was originally published in the September/October 2003 issue. He also taught literature and writing at Princeton University and in a college program for inmates at Rahway State Prison in New Jersey. He lives in New Haven with his wife and daughter.

From Publishers Weekly:

Nostalgia permeates this romantic account of how U.S. air power was established in WWI by a privileged, patriotic group of undergraduates known as the Yale Flying Club. The book was developed from an article published in the Yale Alumni Magazine, and it shows: Wortman harkens back to a bygone era when campus regattas were the place to be seen, Harvard-Yale football games drew crowds 80,000 strong and, perhaps most jarringly, American isolationism placed the country's air command not just behind Germany's fearsome air service, but behind British and French forces as well. Preparing themselves for fire fights and bombing missions that generated harrowing casualty figures, these wealthy, elite Yale students saw it as their responsibility to fight on the front lines, and in the first wave. In a brief but important epilogue, Wortman spells out just how profoundly the times, and in particular the Yale campus, has changed in the past 90 years. Though times have indeed changed, and not entirely for the better, Wortman's creeping nostalgia serves to make attractive a history littered with inconvenient details; how readers react to this viewpoint-especially with regard to the compare-and-contrast epilogue-will largely determine their opinion of the book.
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