Customer Reviews

The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920-1950

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The second volume of an intended trilogy, this is an important as well as readable survey of aviation's development and impact. While we have countless books on specific aircraft, fliers and battles (especially the latter), here the view is a far wider one, assessing the art and role of flying over three vital decades when technical progress was dramatic. Wohl uses a case study approach to provide some depth to his analysis. While a chapter covers Lindbergh's seminal role, most interesting to me is the today all-but-forgotten saga of Italo Balbo, the far-ranging flier whose exploits helped to promote Mussolini's Italy. Among other achievements, he led a mass flight of Italian flying boats from Italy to Chicago in 1933. The illustrations ---many of them in color---are a wonderful supplement to the insight-filled text as they include many period posters and not just pictures of aircraft. This book and its predecessor (A PASSION FOR WINGS) published a decade ago, offer fine aviation history.

With this, the second volume of an intended trilogy devoted to the subject of "Aviation and the Western Imagination," historian Robert Wohl has established huimself as the nation's leading expert on the cultural history of American and European aviation. Covering the period of the "golden age of flight," 1920-1950 this wonderfully illustrated volume begins with Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 and concludes with an overview of the "new civilization" represented by mature (i.e. post-WWII) aviation. In between, fascinating chapters on flying & fascism, American aviation movies, the cult of the aviator, and strategic bombing, round out a book that is essential reading for aviation buffs and people interested in the way technology and culture have crossed paths in history. Aside from a few to many typographical errors, this is a volume both beautiful to look at and read.

With "The Spectacle of Flight," once again, author Robert Wohl, offeres an insightful and highly detailed cultural history of flight and aviation. Wohl picks up where he left off with his excellent first volume, "A Passion for Wings." Anyone lucky enough to have read that book will appreciate the immense amount of scholarship Wohl draws upon in his studies, as well as how he interprets original sources that are often inaccessible to the non-scholar and uses them to draw upon his extremely insightful analyses. As with "A Passion for Wings," Robert Wohl explores and examines the ways in which the airplane is portrayed in all aspects of culture - literature, poetry, painting, film, architecture, popular culture, and political propaganda. In this voloume, it is how aviation is represented and remembered by nations and used by politicians and governments that figure much more prominently.

The first chapter, "The Ambasador of the Skies," delves into great depths into one of the most famous yet mysterious figures in aviation, Charles Lindbergh. Wohl does discuss Lindbergh's often stormy relation with the press, but goes far deeper in examining his significance as a figure in promoting aviation to both corporate intrests and the public at large.

The second chapter, "Flying and Facism," takes on a darker tone, how Benito Mussolini used aviation as a cultural propaganda tool and the essential role that Italo Balbo played as commander of the Italian Air Ministry. Gabriele D'Anunzio was Italy's poet during the first decade of aviation; Italo Balbo was the executor of highly disciplined squadrons of the aesthetically beautiful and powerful Savoia-Marchetti S-55 series of flyhing boats that crossed the North and South Atlantic, presenting an extraordinarily spectacle for all the world to see.

The third chapter, "A Marriage Made in Heaven," delves into the close relationship of cinema and aviation and how the two worked together to create extraordinary romances, both between dashing stars and the public and airplanes, presenting a whole-new spectacle on the giant silver screen for the public to devour and keep coming back for more.

The fourth chapter, "Knights of the Air," takes us to the world of literature, where once again, aviation heroes talk about their exploits in the heavens, once the reserved realm of the gods. Naturally, Antoine de Saint Exupery features prominently here.

The fifth chapter, "Bombs Away!" brings forth the reality that aircraft were not only machines of wonder and romance, but also could and did bring on devastation on an unprecedented scale, especially as civilians were concerned. Aircraft were presented to the pubic in such books as Seversky's "Victory Through Air" (Disney's one serious film as well), but they had to compete with the press and especially such paintings as Picasso's famous "Guernica." Both during and after the war, the essential question would be - is the airplane a tool for bring people together in harmony, as was felt during the euphoria over Lindbergh's famous solo flight, or does it signal the end of the world. In the first volume, "A Passion for Wings," we learned about the suicide of Alberto Santos-Dumont when he witnessed airplanes being used to bomb ships. How did heroic novels and films compare with what was being covered in the newspapers? The big shortcoming in this chapter, however, is the lack of coverage on the use of atomic bombs on Japan and what roles racism in the U.S. played in using these new weapons there.

The sixth chapter, "A New Civilization," summarizes the way aviation was presented to the public, whether through record-breaking long-distance flights or public exhibitions such as the 1939 New York World's Fair, in itself a fascinating piece of propaganda, albeit one very different from what we read about in Mussolini's Italy. We are left with the question, "What will the post-War years bring and how will the truths and fantasies of aviation in the first half of the twentieth century come to be?" For that, we hope Robert Wohl will explore in his proposed third volume.