COLONEL CODY AND THE FLYING CATHEDRAL

A rollicking, consistently surprising biography of an American cowboy who, in an unlikely turn of history, ended his life a hero of British aviation.

“Colonel” Samuel Cody wasn’t exactly a con man, but he possessed all the same skills—including a nicely developed sense of when to abandon strict factuality in the interest of telling a good story. For example, it certainly improved his stock as a showman (a career into which he drifted after working as a cowboy and prospector) that he happened to share the last name of his much more famous sometime employer, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Never mind, wryly observes Jenkins (Daniel Day-Lewis, 1995), that he was born Samuel Cowdery in Iowa in 1867 and shared no kinship whatever with the man he called “Uncle Bill.” Cody had a talent for self-promotion, to be sure, but he also had a genuine, informed passion for kite-flying (picked up as a pastime to while away the hours on the Great Plains) that soon became (once he figured out how to insert himself into one of his soaring contraptions) a sure way to draw a crowd. Cody took his kite-flying show to England, where he earned a large following and a handsome income. He was less successful as a businessman, but he managed to keep one step ahead of a small army of creditors as he labored to build a powered aircraft. Undeterred by Wilbur Wright’s preemptive flight at Kitty Hawk, Cody soldiered on to build the craft he called a “flying cathedral,” and with it he became the first man in England to take to the air, encouraging other inventors to adapt his designs. When he died in a crash in 1913, Britain gave him a funeral with full military honors.

Jenkins does a fine job of threading Cody’s personal saga into the histories of the Wild West and world aviation, weaving a pleasingly reader-friendly narrative.