|
In the 1930s, Pinckert worked for the Southern California Gas Co., and was taught by a co-worker how to fly. She then married her flight instructor, Joe Brier, and in 1939 went on to become a flight instructor herself -- the first female flight instructor licensed by the then-new Civil Aviation Authority. She didn't just stay with the basics: "I was the only one in this area licensed to teach aerobatics, which I loved," she said years later. When her husband flew for the Army Air Corps in World War II, she joined up too -- as a non-combat "WASP" (Women Airforce Service Pilot), helping the war effort by ferrying planes, including B-17 bombers, and training male pilots. She and her husband operated a private airport in San Bernardino, Calif., for 40 years, and ran a charter service that took people to Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Evelyn "Pinky" Brier retired from flying when she was 70, and died January 20 from pneumonia. She was 98. From This is True for 19 January 2008 Suggestions for further reading:
 By: Beryl Markham List Price: $16.00 Amazon Price: $10.88 Editorial Review: West with the Night is the story of Beryl Markham--aviator, racehorse trainer, beauty--and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and '30s. One of the most beautifully crafted books I have ever read, with some of the most poetic prose passages I could imagine, such as the following, resonating with a stately and timeless quality so absent in our modern life: There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo. Born in England in 1902, Markham was taken by her father to East Africa in 1906. She spent her childhood playing with native Maruni children and apprenticing with her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses. In the 1930s, she became an African bush pilot, and in September 1936, became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.  By: Kate Boehm Jerome List Price: $4.99 Amazon Price: $4.99 Editorial Review: Amelia Earhart was a woman of many "firsts." In 1932, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1935, she also became the first woman to fly across the Pacific. From her early years to her mysterious 1937 disappearance while attempting a flight around the world, readers will find Amelia Earhart's life a fascinating story.  By: Terri Blackstock List Price: $13.99 Amazon Price: $9.49 Editorial Review: An investigation into an airline disaster becomes a tangled web of love, mercy and honor in the face of two impossible choices.  By: Tanya Stone List Price: $4.99 Amazon Price: $4.99  By: Reeve Lindbergh List Price: $15.00 Amazon Price: $10.20 Editorial Review: "We Lindberghs still know ourselves best as a tribe: close-knit, self-enclosed, and self-defining, always prepared to be besieged by invisible forces upwelling from the past...." The world knew Charles Lindbergh as a daring aviator, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and controversial isolationist in World War II. His wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was a bestselling author. To their five children they were Father, never Daddy, and Mother. Charles, a stern yet loving father, was surprisingly affectionate and playful; Anne provided a great, gentling love. With remarkable candor, their youngest daughter provides a rare, intimate look at her legendary family...the pervasive impact of her brother's kidnapping and death...the complexity of her parents' long, loving marriage...the night her life and her mother's converged, as Reeve's own infant son died suddenly. With grace and insight, Reeve Lindbergh appraises her remarkable parents, her unusual childhood, and the troubling questions that remain. At once an eloquent reminiscence and a slice of American history, Under a Wing is, at its core, a heartfelt tribute to an extraordinary family.Reeve Lindbergh's memoir offers a uniquely intimate portrait of her family led by her intensely private father, aviator Charles Lindbergh, and mother, writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Under a Wing captures both her parents' complex personalities with immediacy and intimacy. Reeve explores the contrast between a loving father who "would parade imaginary animals across our backs" and the exacting patriarch who, upon return from his frequent absences, called each of his five children into his office to peruse a handwritten list of their achievements and failures. She seems anguished in her response to one of Charles's notorious, bigoted speeches: "How could someone who spoke the words my father did in 1941," she asks, "how did such a person then raise children who by his instruction and his example, day after day and year after year, had learned from him ... that such words were repellent and unspeakable?" She offers too a blunt but tender portrait of Anne in old age--she has been physically and mentally impaired by a series of stroke--that proves she has a mature understanding of a deeply loving woman who nonetheless always held some part of herself in reserve for her writing. This impressive memoir brings readers close to the private people within two legendary public figures. |
About the HUs
About This is True
Prev: The playful Richard Knerr Next: Photographic enabler Henry Froehlich |