A well-researched contribution to women’s and aviation history.
A dual biography reveals women’s trailblazing roles in aviation.
Spaceflight historian Teitel (Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA, 2016), who was an embedded journalist with the New Horizons mission to Pluto team in 2015, brings considerable excitement and knowledge about U.S. space programs to her close look at the life and career of two pioneering women pilots: Jackie Cochran (1906-1980) and Jerrie Cobb (1931-2019). At the start of her career, Cochran fought to be taken seriously, facing down men who tried to discourage her. The winner of multiple awards for her flying prowess, she was the only female entrant in the 1937 Bendix race, which added “a new women’s cross-country speed record” to her accomplishments. In 1938, she was named “First Lady of the Air Lanes.” At the start of World War II, she established the Women’s Flying Training Detachment, a precursor to the Women Airforce Service Pilots program, instituted at 120 Air Force bases, where women pilots tested planes, flew simulated operations, and flew cargo, weapons, and personnel around the country. Cochran directed the WASP program and flew bomber planes during the war. She also became a war correspondent for a magazine that her wealthy and doting husband bought to facilitate her overseas assignments. In 1956, Cochran lost a congressional bid, but she used her celebrity and money to support women’s training as aviators. Cobb, a generation younger, confronted the same prejudice against women pilots that Cochran faced. A NASA administrator who opposed a female astronaut program once described himself as “one of the old school” in favor of keeping women “barefoot and pregnant.” Nevertheless, Cobb proved as ardent as Cochran, submitting herself as a test subject for astronaut training, recruiting other women pilots, and lobbying with NASA director James Webb to admit women as astronauts. Cobb faced opposition not only from NASA, but also from Cochran, who adamantly opposed women’s astronaut training; wielding her high-level political connections (Lyndon Johnson was a friend), she saw Cobb’s efforts quashed.
A well-researched contribution to women’s and aviation history.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1604-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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