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An absolutely superb history of aviation in WWI, in the words of the people who lived it. (Mostly British, with some exceptions.) I love first-person accounts, and this one is exceptionally good: vivid, startling, detailed, exciting, enlightening, often surprisingly funny, and as often unsurprisingly heartbreaking. You don't have to be interested in the subject matter for this to be well worth reading - I'd recommend it to anyone who likes history at all, ever.
It's full of useful details if you write in this period. It confirms that RFC/RAF pilots did get treated at Craiglockhart, along with a lot of other harrowing accounts of PTSD. It's got lots about daily life, like that pilots got pretty good food, put on plays which sometimes involved cross-dressing, and in one case wrote to their parents to ask for fast-growing seeds so they could grow a garden - fast-growing because many of them only survived for a few weeks. It has tons of details about how to fly a Sopwith Camel and other planes of the period, and informs us that the official plural of the German fighter plane, the Albatros, is Albatri.
Levine mostly keeps in the background, though he occasionally indulges in a bit of dubious speculation. For instance, he mentions that W. E. Johns was treated for STDs during his service and dubiously speculates that that was the REAL reason why Biggles stayed single.
I listened to this in audio first, then bought the book in hard copy. The audio version is excellent and includes some music of the period, which was great, but if you want to use it for reference you'll need the physical book.
I was hoping the book would have cites for every source, but unfortunately Levine got the majority of his material from museum and library archives and the originals aren't otherwise available. He only cites six published books in his bibliography, though he definitely uses material from more than that - for instance, he doesn't include Manfred von Richthofen's autobiography in the bibliography, though it's quoted and attributed in the book itself. But he does include the names of everyone he quotes (or says they're anonymous) so it's possible to start from there.
Here's some excerpts, which will give a sense of what the whole book is like. (You all benefit from me FINALLY getting Dragon Dictate to work again on my phone).
These are all accounts by different people. All are British unless marked otherwise.
( Read more... )
It's full of useful details if you write in this period. It confirms that RFC/RAF pilots did get treated at Craiglockhart, along with a lot of other harrowing accounts of PTSD. It's got lots about daily life, like that pilots got pretty good food, put on plays which sometimes involved cross-dressing, and in one case wrote to their parents to ask for fast-growing seeds so they could grow a garden - fast-growing because many of them only survived for a few weeks. It has tons of details about how to fly a Sopwith Camel and other planes of the period, and informs us that the official plural of the German fighter plane, the Albatros, is Albatri.
Levine mostly keeps in the background, though he occasionally indulges in a bit of dubious speculation. For instance, he mentions that W. E. Johns was treated for STDs during his service and dubiously speculates that that was the REAL reason why Biggles stayed single.
I listened to this in audio first, then bought the book in hard copy. The audio version is excellent and includes some music of the period, which was great, but if you want to use it for reference you'll need the physical book.
I was hoping the book would have cites for every source, but unfortunately Levine got the majority of his material from museum and library archives and the originals aren't otherwise available. He only cites six published books in his bibliography, though he definitely uses material from more than that - for instance, he doesn't include Manfred von Richthofen's autobiography in the bibliography, though it's quoted and attributed in the book itself. But he does include the names of everyone he quotes (or says they're anonymous) so it's possible to start from there.
Here's some excerpts, which will give a sense of what the whole book is like. (You all benefit from me FINALLY getting Dragon Dictate to work again on my phone).
These are all accounts by different people. All are British unless marked otherwise.
( Read more... )
