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A Passion for Wings - Wohl, Robert - Yale University Press
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September 1996
328 p., 8 1/2 x 10 3/4
241 b/w + 100 color illus.
ISBN: 9780300068870
ISBN-10: 0300068875
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Paper
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- Related Categories
- History
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A Passion for WingsAviation and the Western Imagination, 1908-1918
Out of Print.
The invention of the airplane was both the realization of an age-old human fantasy and a portent of a great new future. This elegantly written and exhilarating book—the first cultural history of the pioneering phase of aviation—tells the story of the ways in which powered flight captured the imagination of writers, artists, and intellectuals and helped to shape new visions of the world.
Prize-winning historian Robert Wohl describes the colorful early aeronauts: the brilliant, taciturn Wilbur Wright, who arrived in France to demonstrate his invention to a skeptical audience and soon became their idol; Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian expatriate and dandy who delighted the Parisian public by landing his dirigible in front of his house on the Champs-Elysées; and Louis Blériot, the first man to fly across the English Channel. He then looks at responses to the development of the flying machine by such writers and artists as H.G. Wells, Emile Driant, Franz Kafka, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Edmond Rostand, F.T. Marinetti, Vasily Kamensky, Kazimir Malevich, and Robert Delaunay, showing how the responses ranged from celebration of flight to dire warnings of its military implications. Finally he explores the creation of the flying ace, the knights-errant of the sky, analyzing how such men as Roland Garros, Oswald Boelcke, Manfred von Richthofen, and Georges Guynemer became famous, how they came to terms with their deadly pursuit, and how they were mythologized after their deaths. Generously illustrated with rare photographs, drawings, paintings, and posters, the book evokes an era of pride, power, and endless possibility, when the sky first became a new frontier.
Robert Wohl is professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also the author of the prize-winning book The Generation of 1914.
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