Customer Reviews

Amelia Earhart's Daughters: The Wild And Glorious Story Of American Women Aviators From World War II To The Dawn Of The Space Age

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I picked up this book on a friend's recommendation and with few expectations. I had had no interest in aviation, am a tremulous airplane passenger, and when my fourth grade class assembled to watch the histoic moon landing, I had more interest in one small boy next to me than I did in one small step for man. Not anymore. Haynsworth's and Toomey's gripping narrative style and rigorous scholarship provide what few history books do, page-turning excitement. This book conveys the miraculous wonder that spectators must have experienced at early barn-storming events: breathless amazement at mankind flying high and fast beyond the clouds and straight into the impossible. From contraptions of wood and wire, barely recognizable as planes, to 6.2 million pound machines hurtling through the air at speeds of 6,000 miles an hour, Amelia Earhart's Daughters presents the great scope of the history of women in aviation. Walk, run, hell, fly to your nearest bookstore and pick up this book, you'll be glad you did and grateful to these pioneer women aviators and the authors for letting you share the ride.

The stories of women innovators always excite, but the story told by Haynsworth and Toomey is inspirational. More than a feel-good book, however, this book ranks as the best historical text I've read since "The Rape of Europa." Amelia Earhart's Daughters should make its way into all high-school reading lists. The stories of these unknown angels are vital components of the story of women in the 20th Century.

Hainsworth and Toomey have done an excellent job in creating an overview of women as pilots and the special challenges they met in WWII through the Mercury Astronaut testing program. Their research is sound, the writing is easy to digest. They do credit to two groups of women who have been often kept from the history books.

The advantage of reading nonfiction written by two literature specialists is that this book is not only informative and obviously well-researched, it is also compelling and thoroughly enjoyable to read. The challenges faced by the (socio-economically) diverse group of women involved in both the WASP and aerospace programs, as well as their motivations and the women themselves, literally fly off the page. Anyone who still believes that historical accounts can ever be objective is either naive or uneducated, and the bias here is in favor of the women, but not undeservedly or unreasonably so. They persevered and contributed greatly to our society when many, male or female, would have given up, and this account of their struggle is very even-handed. As a high school teacher, I will recommend this book to my students of both sexes as an absorbing lesson in history, government, and the role of determination and sacrifice in achievement. Well done!

I sat up all night reading this book. These women, especially Jackie Cochran, are now my heroes. In fact, I was originally a physics/math double major, but I decided to switch to astronomy with a physics minor and study aviation so that I, too, can follow this exciting path. Mars really *does* need women, and I plan to be the first one to walk there!

Buy and read this extraordinary book. You'll probably change your major, too.

The book is divided into two parts, both of which detail individually and collectively the experiences of women pioneers in aviation and space flight. The first describes the Women Airforce Service Pilots of WWII. These women flew every aircraft in the U.S. Army Air Force inventory six million miles in all weather. Thirty-eight died in service to their country. The book's second part is a detailed account of Jenie Cobb and the twelve other women tested at the Lovelace Clinic in 1960-61--the same tests administered to the Mercury astronauts. The book reads like good fiction, yet is all the more amazing because it's fact. These women's unrelenting courage in the face of all sort of adversities, not the least of which was prejudice, was nothing less than amazing. I picked the book up on the way home from work last Friday, and stayed up all night reading it.

I was really entertained by this narrative of women pilots. It starts at the beginning of WWII and goes through NASA's "Women in Space" program in the 60's. It's fast-paced, FUNNY, and sometimes poignant. I picked it up because of its cover--an old photo of these four chic young women pilots in front of their WWII plane. By the time I finished it, all I could do was ask myself why I hadn't heard of these amazing women pilots before. I've recommended this book to several friends and we agreed that the story (especialy the stories of the WASPs and the story of Jerrie Cobb) would make a fabulous movie.

Some of these stories are incredible--when Pat Patterson and Marge Gilbert land a B-26 on one engine, when Hazel Ying Lee gets mistaken for a Japanese pilot, when Nancy Love buzzes a control tower because the control tower operator can't imagine that a women is flying a P-51 Mustang. It's gripping stuff!

This book seems more intent on making a case that women were overlooked as pilots rather than on telling their story. None of the women come to life; rather than presenting fresh information, this book recycles anecdotes and headlines into a narrative. The listing of the names and backgrounds of the women who participated in the WASPs and in the astronaut training program resembles nothing as much as a litany of saints, with no fleshing out of them as real people. And the author applies today's standards retroactively and asks "why" rather than explains the reasons for the prevailing attitude of the times, and in one MAJOR instance the author presents discredited information as truth.

Jackie Cochran was not an orphan, and she grew up with her biological family; she invented the story of being an orphan for Life Magazine. And she didn't pick the name "Cochran" at random; Cochran was the name of her first husband. This error is made all the more egregious by the way the author makes the mystery of Jackie's origin a lynchpin of her story, stating that the letter informing her who her parents were remained sealed until her husband's death, whereupon it was burned! The author obviously did no original research, but simply repeated the standard story.

There is a real story about women aviators in the 20th century, but this isn't where to look to find it. What must have really happened is faintly visible between the lines, despite the author's attempts to simplify the story and give it a soft golden glow. These women deserve better.

This is a good book. I liked the people in it and the stories were interesting. There was a lot of stuff here I never knew before.