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Summary
Author Notes
David Toomey is a visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, teaching technical writing and creative nonfiction.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
During WWII, a group of American women pilots under the leadership of the legendary Jacqueline Cochran shattered the aviation gender barrier by performing feats that, until then, women supposedly could not do. Under the auspices of the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), a division of the U.S. Air Force, Cochran's aviators flew some of the fastest and most dangerous aircraft of the day, including the P-51 Mustang fighter, notorious for taxing the strength and skill of its pilots. Because the story of the WASPs is already well known, Haynsworth, an advertising copywriter, and Toomey, who teaches English at Virginia Tech (Blacksburg), to their credit, use the Cochran/WASPs tale as a springboard for a series of lively chronicles of unsung female heroics. One of their best anecdotes involves a Chinese-American woman who crash-lands in a Texas field in 1943 while in training for the Air Force. The terrorized locals insist she's a Japanese invader until the pilot and her fellow soldiers stage a mock surrender. The authors present freshly angled details on a number of familiar episodes from other historical eras such as the U.S.-Soviet space race. The pioneering voyage of Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, is related with wit and drama so that, 35 years later, we're still relieved to read that her prolonged silence in orbit resulted not from death, as Soviet engineers feared, but because she'd fallen into a deep and weightless sleep. Informative, often gripping, this is a must-read for those who would understand the indelible contrail women in aviation and space flight have left in their wake since the invention of the airplane. Editor, Claire Wachtel; agent, David Hendin. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
An attempt at history penned by an advertising copywriter and an English teacher, who offer a paean to women pilots during and after WWII. Haynesworth (the copywriter) and Toomey (English/Virginia Tech) tell of the tumultuous early days following Pearl Harbor, when the US was frantically mobilizing the military, including the Army Air Corps. The Air Ferry Command was formed to transfer military planes from factories to assembly areas for shipment to training fields and overseas. The initiative to attract licensed and experienced women pilots to the Ferry Command was led by Jackie Cochran, a prominent she-pilot of the time, whose ideas were financed by her wealthy husband, Floyd Odlum. By 1943 these volunteer women pilots, drawn mainly from affluent families who could afford private planes during the Great Depression, overcame many obstacles within the highly pressured Army Air Corps, graduating from trainers to more complex planes like B-17s and B-25s. One problem: their civilian volunteer status lacked the military benefits of the Wacs and Waves. They had to pay their own expensesincluding burial costs. Alas, the book seems based on the advertising/public relations model that accentuates the positive and eliminates the negative, thus sabotaging the objectivity of the professional historian. Facts not dealt with include the death of 38 of the pilot pioneers, who lost their lives in service for their country (not to mention the unknown number who were ``washed out'' in military training). The authors do trace the gradual progress of female astronauts during the space age. Despite its shortcomings, the book is a well-deserved salute to the intrepid young women who answered the call of their country to risky duty in perilous times. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Booklist Review
Haynsworth and Toomey's study of American women aviators concentrates almost exclusively on the WASPs of World War II and the would-be female astronauts of the early 1960s. It also suffers from occasional overdoses of purple prose. It does provide, however, a sound account of the WASPs that reports some experiences not covered in previous books. It pays impartial tribute to both Jacqueline Cochran and Nancy Love, who, along with Hap Arnold, can claim most of the credit for launching the WASPs and who fought to get them military status. The later (and better) account of the aspiring early 1960s female astronauts, who were spearheaded by Jerrie Cobb, fully covers how they were grounded by a combination of prejudice and spacecraft designs that required onboard engineering test pilots. It includes capsule biographies of the 13 women, now even more thoroughly forgotten than most of their kind, before leaping more than 30 years forward to 1995 and the first woman-piloted U.S. space mission. --Roland Green
Library Journal Review
Mixing these stories with the chronicle of flight in general, the authors paint a vivid picture of the obstacles that women faced in their collective quest to take to the skies. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.