The Roaring Twenty: The First Cross-Country Air Race for Women Review

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(More customer reviews)Rebeccasreads highly recommends THE ROARING 20 as an elegant tribute to our flying great-grandmothers.
1929 was a glorious year for the spills & thrills in the history of flight culminating in the National Air Races & Aeronautical Exposition in Cleveland, Ohio.
It will also feature a 9 day, 2,800 mile women's cross-country air race from Santa Monica in California to Ohio. These 20 aviatrixes, including Amelia Earhart, Evelyn "Bobbi" Trout, Mary Von Mach, Florence "Pancho" Barnes, Edith Foltz, Mary Haizlip & Opal Kunz, will fly by day & camp by night surviving many adventures & much excitement! One pilot with crash & burn, others will drop out & the death-defying few will make it to the finish line.
As you read THE ROARING 20, with its newspaper headlines & photos, you will be transported back to a very different time & into a crowd of remarkable women.

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Adventure, excitement, and fearlessness take wing in the dramatic true story of the twenty aviatrixes who set off on the first Women's Cross-Country Air Derby. Readers will thrill to the feats of "the roaring twenty," the daredevil pilots who pioneered women's aviation in this 2800-mile race from Santa Monica, California, to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929. This cross-country odyssey was the first of its kind: nine days of grueling endurance that was dismissively dubbed the "Powder Puff Derby" by the press. Yet the American public was captivated. The nation already knew and loved Amelia Earhart, and it soon warmed to such colorful characters as the cigar-smoking stunt flyer Florence Pancho Barnes, former wing-walker Phoebe Omlie, and New York society rebel Opal Kunz. The experienced adventurer Marvel Crosson was one of the early favorites-until her mysterious disappearance. Americans eagerly followed the daily drama, charmed, then shocked, as the race left a twisting trail of intrigue in its slipstream. Relive the intense competition and the death-defying dangers: stormy weather, mechanical challenges, typhoid fever, and even the suspicion of sabotage. The views of a condescending and often hostile press are recounted, as well as the heroines' glamorous appearances at balls and banquets during their soaring nine-day escapade. This real-life tale also provides a bird's-eye view of a feverish period in American social history, as women redefined their roles throughout the "roaring '20s" and the country partied through the Jazz Age before crashing back to Earth with the Depression. Superbly illustrated with fifty evocative duotone photographs, and featuring a detailed National Geographic map of the route, this is a book to capture the imagination and dreams of young girls from coast to coast.

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Joy of Soaring: A Training Manual Review

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(More customer reviews)THE JOY OF SOARING: A Training Manual
First published in 1969,by the Soaring Society of America, revised by The Soaring Society of America (SSA) in 1989

In the mid-1960s, soaring experienced a tremendous surge in popularity across the U.S. as thousands of pilots came to the sport. Many got their first look at the sport through Walt Disney's "Wonderful World of Color" TV feature "The Boy Who Flew with the Condors." Although interest surged, at the time there was no standardized training manual available to student glider pilots, only the individual manuals used at various soaring sites around the country. The "Joy of Soaring" collected and repackaged the very best practices in a readable and well-illustrated format. It has since been superceeded by other soaring texts for the Practical Test Standards for a Glider Rating. Many other specialist publications give detailed treatment to more contemporary aspects of soaring today. This book's lasting appeal as the best-loved soaring primer comes from its practical, readable, common sense approach to the nuances of proficient glider flight. The book contains many black and white photographs of classic gliders. Illustrated by Gil Parcell, who was well known for his cartoons in Soaring magazine, this book captures the essence of soaring during its heyday. It is still the preferred introduction to the sport of unpowered flight. It remains in print, so a reader has the choice of a crisp new edition, or the nostalgia of owning one of the ubiquitous original, used copies.

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