Winston Groom
National Geographic, 2013.

The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight is a combined overview-biography of three of the most famous and influential aviators of the early 20th century. The book essentially follows each man chronologically through his life, but it does so by intertwining their periods of life so that, in some cases, they almost seem to grow up together — which, as contemporaries, they essentially did. This somewhat unique style can be slightly confusing to some readers, as the famous aviator might change from one chapter to the next, but it also provides a very enlightening and important context to what each of those famous pilots did.

There is an interesting contrast, for example, between Lindbergh’s cross-Atlantic voyage, accomplished solely by visual lookout in 1927, with Doolittle’s experimentation with flight instruments and totally “blind flight” two years later in 1929. The varying political views of each aviator through the interwar period and World War II are also interesting when viewed essentially side-by-side and understanding that they came about in the same cultural context.

The Aviators is not a minutely-detailed Read more