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Title: A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1908-1918 by Robert Wohl ISBN: 0-300-06887-5 Publisher: Yale University Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00

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Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: A wonderful book--and misunderstood by Wantagh reviewer.
Comment: I'd give this book 4 1/2 stars--higher than the Wantagh reviewer, who just factually (but grossly) misunderstands what the book intends to do. The book is not a history of aviation and whose patents and business ventures succeeded or failed. Rather, Wohl offers a beautifully illustrated, provocative analysis of how the advent and early development of flight worked upon the visual arts, literature, concepts of distance and xenophobic notions of national security. This focus comes out clear in the very title, which notes a relation between "Aviation and the Western Imagination." Wohl has found a great topic and his exploration of it presents us with a rich discussion of the links between culture and technology, between machine and imagination. So Wohl is not to be scolded for misinterpreting or omitting this or that avionics pioneer, for he is laying out how we as culture (not as meticulous researchers) assimilated this incredible new contraption, the airplane. Wohl poses no misinterpretations or bad emphases; his subject is not who did more for the science or its commercial applications, but who and what ended up on canvases, in music, and in bookstalls.

His chapters on art--the suprematist Malevich, the colorful effusions of Robert Delauney--demonstrate how flight literally altered methods of depicting space and motion, not just how airplanes entered artworks. He offers similar insights concerning literature, both high and popular, and throughout illustrates his suggestions with abundant art reproductions, photos, and extended primary source quotations. The book is probably the only think-piece I own that could be mistaken for a diverting coffee-table book. I mean that as a compliment, for the volume is both attractive and searching, and always engaging.

Rating: 3
Summary: Almost a complete work
Comment: Wohl's "A Passion for Wings" is a comprehensive look at early aviation history and those who made it happen. His tales from France and Germany leading up to, and during, the Great War are fine. Unfortunately, in treating the American aviation community, Mr. Wohl dwells too much on the Wright brothers at the expense of Glenn H. Curtiss and Alexander Graham Bell who, together, came up with a 'solution' to the 'flying problem' completely independent of Wilbur and Orville. Mr. Bell suggested, and Mr. Curtiss first utilized, ailerons instead of the Wrights' inherently unstable and dangerous 'wing-warping' technique.

During the period of 1908 though the start of WWI, the greatest blight on the nacent aviation industry was the Wrights' rabid patent infringement attack on Curtiss and Bell. By avoiding discussion of this omnipresent story of the time, Wohl completely misses one of the key issues of the day. His mistreatment of Curtiss is glaring given the fact that the U.S. Army purchased thousands of Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" aircraft to train their pilots, while the Wrights were completely out of the airplane manufacturing business by 1912!