Reviews of Aviation Books
This page contains an index of aviation
books that I've read. I have written reviews for some of
the books.
I seem to write at much slower pace than I read, so very few books actually
have reviews. But if you are interested in a particular book on this list and the
it has no review, just drop me a note and I'll write one.
One recommendation I can give you is to read everything by Ernest Gann and
Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
If you want to know what I'm reading right now follow this link.
Links to other Aviation Book Sites
Here are some links to aviation book sites I have found around the Web.
- Ayer Company Publishers
- they have a pretty large list of aviation books. This is a commercial site
you can buy books from them.
- World War II Books -
this is a nice list of books, it includes book reviews as well. They are classified
by topics (like Axis Pilots, America Pilots, etc).
- Barnstorming to Air Safety -
a website with a book on development of aviation. I haven't read the book yet, but it looks
interesting.
What's new?
- 12/07/2001 - removed some dead links. Added biography of Lindberg to the list.
- 6/11/2001 - added two more books. One old one Skunk Works about
development of the stealth fighter and one new one Cobras over the Tundra about
pilots who delivered P-39 to Russia during WW II. This last book is available from
the author at: http://users.intercomm.com/arktika.
- 5/15/2001 - updated the link to the WW II aviation book list.
- 3/12/2000 - I haven't updated this page in a while, mostly because
I've been reading a lot of non-aviation books. Today I'm removing all references to
Amazon.com in protest of their Web Patents. If you want to find out more
click here. You can also visit
http://www.nowebpatents.com.
- 4/1/99 - added a review of Aces Wild. A book
on flight testing in the early jet era and a book which convincingly
presents the suprizing idea that the first person to fly faster than
sound was not Chuck Yeager.
- 3/29/99 - added two more books by German WWII pilots:
Stuka Pilot and Battling the Bombers. Also
added a book, One Zero Charlie, on today's general aviation
flying.
- 11/27/98 - added two more books from Australia:
Verdict on Erbus - book on investigation of Air New Zeland
DC-10 crash in Antarctica, and My, God! It's a Woman -
an autobiography of an australian aviation pioneer Nancy Bird.
- 10/12/98 - added two books. One is a biography of Nevil Shute, titled
Slide Rule, which I got from a friend in Australia. The other
is Thirty Seconds over Tokyo - which is just Ted Lawson's diary
of the 1942 Doolittle Tokyo raid and which served as the script for
the movie with the same title.
- 8/24/98 - added four books from my summer reading. Two
amazing biographies if WWII pilots: Douglas Bader (Reach for the
Sky) and of Erich Hartman (The Blond Knight of Germany)
the highest scoring fighter pilot ever (!). I also read Inside
the Sky a book by William Langewiesche (son of the author of
Stick and Rudder). It was very good - I recommend it.
- 6/18/98 - added a review of Cloud Dancing,
a book about soaring. I also joined the
Amazon
associates. So if you follow any links from my page to Amazon and buy a book
I get money. I like that.
- 4/23/98 - added a review of A Life in the Clouds,
and added few more old books from my attic to the list. Added a section
with URLs of book finders.
- 11/31/97 - added few more books. One new book you might consider
reading is Flight of the Gin Fizz by Henry Kisor. It's a very
enjoyable description of the author's flight retracing the flight of the
Gin Fizz (the first transcontinental flight) in his own Cessna 150.
- 9/6/97 - added buch of books and a review of War in the Air.
- 7/10/97 - added a section of links to other aviation book
lists and added few more titles. The book Flight of Passage by
Rinker Buck is really good. I just read it and haven't written a review
yet.
- 6/21/97 - added few more titles to get more than 50
books. I also added reviews for "Night Flight" and "The Black Watch".
- 6/10/97 - I replaced this page with three separate pages. I
generate each page from a simple text file using a Python script. I
wrote an article about these scripts for Linux Gazzette.
Click here if you'd
like to see it.