{"product_id":"into-the-blue-american-writing-on-aviation-and-spaceflight-a-library-of-america-special-publication-9781598531084","title":"Into the Blue: American Writing on Aviation and Spaceflight: A Library of America Special Publication","description":"\u003cp\u003eInto the Blue revisits the remarkable trajectory of Americans in air and space  gathering sixty of the best eyewitness and participant narratives from Benjamin Franklins letters on the first hot air balloons to Chris Joness account of being marooned on the International Space Station. Here are those who made flight happen: Orville and Wilbur Wright  self-taught pioneers whose homespun invention stunned the world; World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker  whose memoirs (excerpted here for the first time in unedited form) describe the frightening novelties of aerial combat; and daredevils like Texas barnstormer Slats Rodgers and test pilot Jimmy Collins. Ernest Hemingway offers a vivid dispatch on a 1922 flight over France  and Gertrude Stein muses on the look of America from the air; Charles A. Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart narrate their groundbreaking transatlantic flights; Ralph Ellison reflects on the experience of African American airmen at Tuskegee; William F. Buckley Jr. recounts his mishaps as an amateur pilot; Wernher von Braun envisions a space station of the future  while astronauts John Glenn  Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin provide firsthand recollections of the conquest of space. Here too  among many other subjects  are scenes and episodes in the development of commercial aviation  from the hiring of the first stewardesses and the high stress lives of air traffic controllers to the new ubiquity of what Walter Kirn calls \"Airworld.\" A thirty-two-page insert offers photographs  some previously unpublished  of the writers and their crafts.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45647066071093,"sku":"ByrdShop_1598531085","price":21.63,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781598531084.jpg?v=1781687375","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/into-the-blue-american-writing-on-aviation-and-spaceflight-a-library-of-america-special-publication-9781598531084","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}