Customer Reviews

Legend & Legacy: The Story of Boeing and Its People

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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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.

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.

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.