A brisk, entertaining history of daring and passion.
The tale of two intrepid aviators who got caught in a sordid scandal.
On Aug. 2, 1932, William Lancaster, a renowned British pilot, stood trial for murder. Watching nervously among hundreds of spectators was Australian Jessie Keith-Miller, Lancaster’s former co-pilot and lover. How the pair ended up in a Miami courtroom is the subject of Mead’s (English/Baruch Coll.; Angelic Music: The Story of Benjamin Franklin’s Glass Armonica, 2016, etc.) colorful, fast-paced narrative, a tale of ambition, betrayal, lust, and devotion. The story begins in 1927, when Lancaster and Keith-Miller took off from London, aiming to make a record-breaking flight to Australia, the first in a light plane. The two were basically strangers, but they bonded over their desire for adventure, fame, and escape from unhappy marriages. Lancaster had been a Royal Air Force pilot, but Keith-Miller learned to fly shortly before the flight. After two hours of instruction, she was already flying solo. Mead underscores the sexism that pervaded aeronautics in the 1920s: Keith-Miller and her new friend Amelia Earhart decried the “public prejudice against women aviators.” Flying was undeniably risky. Planes were small, vulnerable to “slashing rain and battering wind,” sleet, and fog; engines failed, fuel leaked, parts broke midflight, and crashes occurred with frightening frequency. When Lancaster and Keith-Miller landed in Australia, they instantly became “the world’s thrilling new heroes.” They also became lovers. In the months following their success, they looked forward to careers in aviation—until 1929, when a severe economic downturn dried up money for test flights and competitions. The author recounts the couple’s financial troubles, which led Keith-Miller to take up a publisher’s suggestion that she write her autobiography. She teamed with a ghostwriter, and while Lancaster was away pursuing a dicey moneymaking scheme, she fell in love with him. Lancaster was devastated, yet when he returned to Keith-Miller, he seemed resigned to their decision to marry. Then a shot was fired, and Miller and Lancaster became international news.
A brisk, entertaining history of daring and passion.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-10924-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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