Wings: A History of Aviation from Kites to the Space Age Review

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(More customer reviews)Tom Crouch's _Wings_ is, by far, the best one volume account of the history of aviation currently available. Not surprisingly (given his position as senior curator of aeronautics at the Air&Space Museum), Crouch is exceptionally well-versed in the subject. Moreover, he is a fine writer. The text is engaging, well-organized, and strikes a good balance between technical, cultural, and "nuts and bolts" aspects of the subject. Overall, the book is quite an accomplishment.
Even so, as another reviewer has noted, there are far too many mistakes in the book. Some of them are clearly the results of sloppy editing by the publisher. In what has to be the most outrageous example of poor editing I've seen, the name of Russian aviation pioneer Nikolai Zhukovsky appears transliterated in three different ways: the more familiar "Zhukovsky" plus "Zhukovskii" AND "Joukowski." Amazingly two different transliterations appear on the same page within three sentences of each other ... TWICE! (pp. 137 & 376)
While transliteration and typographical mistakes might be explained by the publisher's rush to release the book in time to coincide with official celebrations of the Centennial of Flight, the factual mistakes are far less understandable.
Among the more egregious examples:
Regarding initial German airstrikes on the USSR in June 1941 Crouch writes: "[the Luftwaffe] struck sixty-six Soviet forward airfields in southern Rumania..." (p. 396) [Huh?]
"The Soviets lost two hundred planes that day [21 June 1941]" (p. 396) [In fact, they lost more than 900.]
On page 417 Crouch writes that the "roughly half a million US dollars" spent by the Germans on their rocket programs (V-1 & V-2) cost "one-fourth the price of the Manhattan Project." (p. 417) [The Manhattan Project cost almost $2 Billion, not the $2 million that Crouch implies.]
Again, this *is* the best sinlge volume available on the subject.
It should have been better.



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