Barnstormer, World War II fighter, test pilot, aerobatic genius — Bob Hoover is a living aviation legend, the man General James “Jimmy” Doolittle called “the greatest stick and rudder pilot who ever lived.” Hoover’s career spans the history of American aviation, and now he tells his amazing story with all the flat-out honesty and gusto that have made his life an extraordinary adventure.

At twenty-two, Hoover was a decorated World War II fighter pilot, already famous both for his aerobatic abilities — including looping under a bridge in Tunisia — and for surviving seventeen equipment-failure crash landings as a test pilot. Then the Germans knocked his Mark V Spitfire out of the sky. He made three attempts to escape en route to the infamous Stalag I prison camp, and after sixteen brutal months, finally escaped by stealing a German plane and flying it to Holland.

After the war, Hoover tested the first jets at Wright Field, dogfighting Chuck Yeager, the man who’d come to call him “Pard.” In the quest to break the sound barrier in the Bell X-1, Hoover endured every step of the grueling G-force training along with Yeager. But soon after Yeager’s historic flight, Hoover broke both his legs in a desperate bailout from a blazing F-84 Thunderjet — dashing his dreams of flying the X-1 himself.

In Forever Flying, we relive the thrills and danger Hoover continued to face as a civilian test pilot: testing the first jets to take off and land aboard aircraft carriers; flying bombing runs over North Korea; and demonstrating new planes for fighter pilots, who had to be warned not to attempt to duplicate Hoover’s spectacular spins, stalls, and rolls. He became an adviser to engineering on the X-15 rocket, and rose through the corporate ranks, famed for flying his daring aerobatics routines in a business suit and straw hat instead of a pilot’s “G suit.”

Bob Hoover has flown more than 300 types of aircraft, dazzled crowds at more than 2,000 air shows all over the world, and is still flying today. He’s set both transcontinental and “time to climb” speed records, and known such great aviators as Orville Wright, Eddie Rickenbacker, Charles Lindbergh, Jacqueline Cochran, Neil Armstrong, and Yuri Gagarin, who saved Hoover from the KGB at an international aerobatics competition in Moscow during the height of the Cold War.

Spiced by reminiscences from fellow fliers, friends, and his wife, all of whom recount Hoover’s devilish practical jokes as well as his death-defying flights, Forever Flying reveals the magnificent true story of a great American hero.

No less an authority than Jimmy Doolittle considers Hoover “the greatest stick and rudder pilot who ever lived,” and in this autobiography, Hoover provides ample evidence that he has been as skilled a pilot of jets as he was of earlier aircraft. Born in 1922, he soloed at age 16 and went on to become a fighter pilot in WWII, during which he was shot down and served more than a year as a German prisoner of war. In 1950, he became one of the chief test pilots for North American Aviation and, subsequently, for the merged NAA-Rockwell. Although he became an executive in that corporation, he frequently climbed into the cockpit to demonstrate its products, even defying corporate orders by joining in some bombing missions during the Korean War. Hoover retired from the industry in 1986 but continued appearing in air shows until 1992, when, at the age of 70, his license was pulled by the FAA. After a three-year legal battle led by F. Lee Bailey, his license was reinstated last year. Shaw (Down for the Count) has helped him tell his exciting story, including anecdotes about Orville Wright, Charles Lindbergh, Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong, all of whom he knew personally. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Hoover is one of the nation’s premier airmen, probably best known to the public for his spectacular airshow routines. During the course of a half-century spent in numerous cockpits, he has gone from barnstorming in prop planes to dogfighting Germans to testing Supersopnic jets and done them all well. Along the way he has flown with?and frequently against?many of the legendary names in American aviation. His book is not so much a formal autobiography as a chatty memoir of the aviation community. Writing with the swagger he has justly earned, Hoover breezes past the mundane details of career, training, and family life in favor of an unending series of flying stories and reminiscences that are full of nifty details. Casual readers as well as airplane buffs will be fascinated. For popular collections.?Raymond L. Puffer, U.S. Air Force History Prog., Edwards AFB, Cal.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Forever Flying: Fifty Years of High-Flying Adventures, from Barnstorming in Prop Planes to Dogfighting Germans to Testing Supersonic Jets
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On the 150th anniversary of his death, the great British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) remains an enigmatic character, steeped in contradictions between his actions, his proclamations and his interior life. The latter is not Sullivan’s central concern. Thus, the concealed love Macaulay felt for his two youngest sisters is not far developed here. Sullivan concentrates instead on Macaulay’s uncanny understanding of England’s grand position in the world. The author observes that long before Henry Kissinger, [Macaulay] understood that ‘power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.’ What makes him a unusual figure for our time is his classicism—his chief models being Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus—as well as his position as a bestseller with a multivolume history of England. Macaulay’s literary interests included Milton, Dryden, Byron and Bacon, but Machiavelli was the overriding influence, says Sullivan, a historian and associate vice president of Notre Dame. Macaulay detested Dickens for his socialistic smarminess; he anticipated Ivan Pavlov more than Sigmund Freud; and he was an abolitionist who didn’t believe in abolishing slavery. Overall, Macaulay remains a confounding figure, whose personality lies largely unraveled. 18 b&w illus. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In this long-awaited study, Robert Sullivan clearly and persuasively explores Thomas Babington Macaulay’s personal life and intellectual development in tandem, a difficult and rare achievement. He presents a probing, convincing, and ultimately devastating portrait of the mind of a liberal imperialist that transforms our understanding of Macaulay. Victorian intellectual history has no similar study. Macaulay is a major accomplishment that makes Sullivan one of the premier Victorianists of his generation.
–Frank M. Turner, Yale University (20100130)...

In a brilliantly conceived book, Jeremi Suri puts the tumultuous 1960s into a truly international perspective in the first study to examine the connections between great power diplomacy and global social protest. Profoundly disturbed by increasing social and political discontent, Cold War powers united on the international front, in the policy of detente. Though reflecting traditional balance of power considerations, detente thus also developed from a common urge for stability among leaders who by the late 1960s were worried about increasingly threatening domestic social activism. ...

Here the development of nuclear weapons is viewed from the perspective of the scientist. From the discovery of fission to the Manhattan Project, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the arms race and early steps toward arms control, this book provides a context for developments in the period 1939-1963. Lawrence Badash traces the course of this tumultuous and apocalyptic period with scientific clarity and sympathetic understanding.

“”[Badash's] admirable book . . . is authoritative (good bibliography), and yet it is good reading.”

“”[Badash's] admirable book . . . is authoritative , and yet it is good reading.”

Scientists & Development/Nuclear (Control of Nature) ...

“Richard Gabriel’s Hannibal is a worthy successor to his books on Subotai, Muhammad, Scipio Africanus, Thutmose III, and Philip of Macedon. Informed equally by the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of antiquity and his own military background, Hannibal is a highly readable military biography of a brilliant tactician who failed to understand the culture of his Roman enemy and thus could win battle after battle, but never the war. Gabriel has once again made a significant contribution to our understanding of warfare in antiquity, one that scholars and general readers will find fascinating.” –Keith Poulter, editor of Military Chronicles...

This book examines the Reserve Officers Training Corps program as a distinctively American expression of the social, cultural, and political meanings of military service. Since 1950, ROTC has produced nearly two out of three American active duty officers, yet there has been no comprehensive scholarly look at civilian officer education programs in nearly forty years. ...

In 336 b.c. Philip of Macedonia was assassinated and his twenty-year-old son, Alexander, inherited his kingdom. Immediately quelling rebellion, Alexander extended his fathers empire through-out the Middle East and into parts of Asia, fullling the soothsayer Aristanders prediction that the new king should perform acts so important and glorious as would make the poets and musicians of future ages labour and sweat to describe and celebrate him. ...

Spanning the years from c. 5000 B.C. to the early centuries A.D., the Nile Valley civilization was one of the earliest created by humankind. It remains one of the most fascinating and influential. This handy yet encyclopedic reference work offers a comprehensive overview of ancient Egyptian history, from Predynastic times to the Old and New Kingdoms to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Accessible, authoritative, and clearly organized, the Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt affords an engaging look at a culture whose art, architecture, religion, and medicine came to form the basis of Western Civilization....

"Michaels…deftly explains how the so-called Anbar Awakening emerged from this seemingly hopeless set of circumstances…."
– The Wall Street Journal...

In this ingenious volume, victory or defeat in the twentieth century’s climactic conflict depended on the secret war of wits that occurred between the scientists, mathematicians, and codebreakers on each side. This is a fascinating look at the behind the scenes duel to develop the winning weapons of World War II.

Once again scouring his seemingly inexhaustible personal archives, as well as public sources, popular historian Breuer has produced yet another collection of rip-roaring tales. With more than 20 books to his credit, Breuer (Unexplained Mysteries of World War II, etc.) employs a formulaic presentation of enticingly named storiesA”Supersecret Station X,” “A Plan to Poison the German Food Supply,” among themAin short, punchy chapters grouped by theme. Written out of passion for its subject, this book reads like good pulp. “Bright Ideas for Winning the War” discloses some of the ludicrous battle tactics proposed by well-meaning armchair generals. “History’s First Nuclear Spy,” Walther Koehler, turns out to be not a double agent, but a triple. “Treachery at Los Alamos” shows how a box of Jell-O played a role in helping a network of spies steal nuclear secrets from the United States on behalf of the Soviet Union. A few of the stories hang unfinished; “Hitler Orders Lethal Gas Assault,” but we never find out where the gas ends up after the attack is aborted. Still, this is a delightful addition to the niche that Breuer has so successfully carved out. Photos. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

“…a great not-so-little book which details a tremendous number of cunning stories from the shadowy military past…” (M2 Best Books, 23 July 2002) –This text refers to the Paperback edition.

“…a great not-so-little book which details a tremendous number of cunning stories from the shadowy military past…” –This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Secret Weapons of World War II ...