Men in the Air

An anthology of more than seventy accounts covers flight literature from Greek Mythology to the Space Age and includes The First Success for the Wright Brothers, First Flight to Paris, and Downing My First Hun.

This collection of machine dreams--flights of fact and fancy from Leonardo da Vinci's "great bird" to William Faulkner's "lowing monoplane"--leave one, as H.G. Wells put it, "like a child in wonderland." This unique anthology "nibbles the outline of the earth," in the words of St. Exupery, and is fodder for all who dare. Lindbergh, Lowell, Byrd, and Earhart are the dreamers; Michener, Heller, and Deighton are the recorders; Armstrong, Glenn, Scott, and McAuliffe are the visionaries. And as Yeager executes a "zero-g roll with a full load of rocket fuel," Poe marvels, "Who shall say that anything is impossible hereafter?" And when at last the "airplane is quiet," we remain, in the words of Bach, "for a moment, still a stranger to the ground." The flight was only too brief. Librarians, this is indeed "the right stuff."-- Mikey Scott, Torrey Pines H . S . , Del Mar, Cal.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.