From Library Journal
Toomey is an English professor who also teaches technical writing and coauthored Amelia Earhart's Daughters. So he seems like the right man to take on the post-World War II fighter pilots who happily volunteered to fly into hurricanes with occasionally lethal consequences.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Using the 1955 disappearance of a navy weather plane inside a hurricane as his reference point, Toomey roams about the presatellite history of research into the tempests. Knowledge about hurricanes was so rudimentary that determining their cyclonic structure was considered progress. From that discovery in the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, advances in knowledge and forecasting were modest. By interspersing the history of hurricane research with the preparations of the ill-fated navy crew, Toomey effectively points out how insufficient understanding of meteorological conditions impelled weather planes to fly in such dangerous conditions. Besides the informative technical coverage about hurricane behavior, the twin-engine Neptune plane, and its weather instrumentation, Toomey delivers an understated narrative that ennobles crew members. He doesn't inflate basic information that's known about them, and alludes to their awareness of the perils in their assignment. Toomey's dramatization of scenarios of what might have happened to the crew--a ditching in the storm's eye or midair wing failure--will keep readers rapt.
Gilbert TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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