Legend & Legacy: The Story of Boeing and Its People [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Robert J. Serling (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1991

This FIRST EDITION book is in very good condition. Every thing is in tact. There is some smudge marks o the dust cover, however not very noticible. Shop from thousands of books in our Amazon store. St. Vincent DePaul is a non-profit charity that has a mission to help any person in need. The funds we receive are used exclusively to further this mission. The society of St. Vincent DePaul has been offering aid to those in need for 176 years, and was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Award. The total amount of assistance provided in our area in 2007 is $659,689. We have served 64541 people in Snohomish county alone in 2009. We offer the best in customer service and back every sale with that promise! Please help support our efforts with your purchase. We have sold and shipped several hundred books and always take care of our customers. Our objective is to ship fast and satisfy every customer who visits our store. Please help us establish a reputation that assures others of our guarantee of satisfaction. If you have a title for which you have been looking, email us with the request and we will get back to you. Thank You!

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Strategic B-17 and B-29 bombers of WW II; Cold War B-52s and Minuteman missiles; moon vehicles, space modules and the jumbo jets that made air travel commonplace--these are some of the aircraft highlighted in this revealing profile of Washington State's Boeing company by aviation writer Serling ( The President's Plane Is Missing ). Of even greater interest are the personalities--the executives, engineers, designers, skilled workers, union leaders, financiers, government regulators, and airline figures like Lindbergh, Trippe and Rickenbacker--who have played roles in the production of today's airliner, with its 4.5 million parts. Two futuristic items in this gripping industrial epic stand out: Boeing's early planning for flights to Mars in the next century and current computerized construction-planning programs, which may avert the kind of aircraft flaws that are currently discovered only in fatal accidents. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This is a detailed look at Boeing's bumpy history from the moment in 1910 when William Edward Boeing first saw an airplane and thought he could build a better product to the megasuccessful aerospace company of today. The story, told by the people who have worked at Boeing, recounts the company's successes and its failures (notably, attempts to diversify into such things as furniture, boats, windmills, potatoes, and milk). Boeing's involvement with the space program is interestingly detailed, as is the crash of 1969-71 when the payroll was trimmed from 101,000 workers to 38,000. The company later rebounded to a current annual $6.5 billion profit. This readable and well-documented history is recommended for technology collections. For a more standard company history of Boeing, see Eugene E. Bauer's Boeing in Peace and War , LJ 2/1/91.--Ed.
- William A. McIntyre, New Hampshire Technical. Coll. Lib., Nashua
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: St Martins Pr; 1st edition (July 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031205890X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312058906
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #893,454 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More than just Boeing in this book, April 16, 2000

By 

David Martin (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Legend & Legacy: The Story of Boeing and Its People (Hardcover)

This is a great read for anyone involved in any way with aviation; from the pilots to feds, to managers and engineers. The Boeing Company's history is covered in a way that gives a broad view of nearly the entire history of Aviation.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very good history of the Boeing Company, January 8, 2009

By 

Daniel Carey (Seattle, WA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Legend & Legacy: The Story of Boeing and Its People (Hardcover)

Serling's book is a very good history of the Boeing company, one of the better ones I have read. It is quite detailed. The book covers Boeing from its beginnings to 1991. It does a very good job of covering all the company's activities, from building bombers to commercial jets to missiles and spacecraft. He also discusses activities at Wichita and Philadelphia. Serling also does a very good job of placing the importance of these accomplishments in their context in terms of what they meant to the company.
Serling uses plenty of first person accounts, ranging from executives, managers, engineers, accountants, machinists and test pilots. However, it is weighed more in favor of those who were managers and engineers. There is relatively little about the company's labor history or strikes as compared to other books about the company. A bibliography would have been very welcome. He does list in the introduction those who contributed, but a comprehensive list of his sources would have been helpful.
I recommend this book to all who want to know about the story of the Boeing company.

3.0 out of 5 stars Boeing Autobiography, September 18, 2011

By 

Normand Hamel "Normand Hamel" (Brownsburg-Chatham, Quebec) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Legend & Legacy: The Story of Boeing and Its People (Hardcover)

I gave this book only three stars because it is totally biased in favour of Boeing. I must recognize that it is very well written though. The author is a novelist and it shows. He is very good at describing various characters. But this became quickly annoying. Yes I am interested to know who did what or who said this and that, but I am less interested to know about various personalities and their lifestyles. But I suspect many readers will like this, especially those who enjoy literary fiction. For me there was an overabundance of psychological profiles. On the other hand there are only a few, and otherwise respectful, descriptions of physical traits and I appreciate that.

But above all what I found most frustrating is that we never got to the bottom of anything. It's all about the Boeing legend and mystique. In this book the Boeing people are all incredibly intelligent, extremely honest and unbelievably competent. They can do no wrong. Boeing is simply the best company in the world and it is obviously managed by the most brilliant people in the industry. Of course they have a few quirks and have done small mistakes, but that only makes them more human...

Before undertaking "Legend & Legacy" Robert Sterling wrote the autobiography of astronaut Frank Borman. I can imagine Borman sitting with him and telling all he wants about his life while the professional writer makes it palatable for potential readers. It was indeed very well done and it worked. But it's like if Sterling had tried to use the same formula with the Boeing people he interviewed and with whom he obviously spent a lot of time listening to what they had to say about the role they played in the history of Boeing. It works well for one individual, but not for en entire corporation! When a man writes his autobiography we expect him to tell us all about what makes him look good and to minimize more embarrassing situations. But for en entire corporation it is simply too much to bear. Even for an admirer of Boeing like myself.

Since it's a book about Boeing I would have liked to have more technical details about the airplanes and maybe a bit less about the people. If the author had chosen to talk essentially about the technology instead, it could potentially have been just as bad though. We need people to design, fabricate and sell those airplanes. In my opinion, in this kind of story equal importance should be given to man and machine. But I acknowledge that it is a difficult balance to reach.

What I liked most about this book is that it covers the entire history of Boeing, from it's creation in 1916 up to the year of publication. It also gives a pretty good overview of the company. But obviously the last twenty years are not covered and they are the most interesting! If the author had written this book more recently he would not have been able to be as complacent toward Boeing as he was here.

Now I only wish that someone with a more obvious desire for objectivity would pick-up the story where Sterling left it and tell us what has since happened to the Boeing legacy.