Reviews

YA-- A collection of more than 70 selections depicting man's determination to fly. The adventures of pilots from mythological flights in Greek literature to the real stuff in the space age, including primary-source material in the forms of first-person accounts of noteworthy events in aviation, stories of air battles, historic flights, and a section on women flyers, provide fascinating fare.

This collection of machine dreams--flights of fact and fancy from Leonardo da Vinci's ``great bird'' to William Faulkner's ``lowing monoplane''--leave one, as H.G. Wells put it, ``like a child in wonderland.'' This unique anthology ``nibbles the outline of the earth,'' in the words of St. Exupery, and is fodder for all who dare. Lindbergh, Lowell, Byrd, and Earhart are the dreamers; Michener, Heller, and Deighton are the recorders; Armstrong, Glenn, Scott, and McAuliffe are the visionaries. And as Yeager executes a ``zero-g roll with a full load of rocket fuel,'' Poe marvels, ``Who shall say that anything is impossible hereafter?'' And when at last the ``airplane is quiet,'' we remain, in the words of Bach, ``for a moment, still a stranger to the ground.'' The flight was only too brief. Librarians, this is indeed ``the right stuff.''-- Mikey Scott, Torrey Pines H . S . , Del Mar, Cal.