rapid fire
Visiting a Novel About Flight
Dawn Over Kitty Hawk (Tom Doherty Associates, 2003) by Col. Walter J. Boyne, USAF (Ret), a former director of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., is the story of Orville and Wilbur Wright and others who simultaneously pursued flight. These include Glenn Curtiss (owner of Pilot’s License No. 1); Samuel Langley, then-secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; Alexander Graham Bell; Octave Chanute; and several others.
The novel dips into the characters’ personal lives and continues past the Wright brothers’ successful flights Dec. 17, 1903, to detail patent disputes and the keen competition for both military and commercial flying contracts.
Many museums tell these tales. The Wright Brothers National Memorial (above) on the windy sand dunes of Kill Devil Hills, N.C., has reproductions of the Wrights’ gliders, the Flyer, and their living quarters. The National Air and Space Museum is home to the actual Wright Flyer of 1903 and many other items of interest. Langley’s ill-fated non-flyer is on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va. The Glenn Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport, N.Y., has a restored 1917 Curtiss JN-4D Jenny and a full-size reproduction of the motorcycle on which Curtiss became (for a time) the fastest man on earth.
— Col. Glenn Pribus, USAF (Ret), and Marilyn Pribus
In Review
Between Flesh And Steel: A History of Military Medicine From the Middle Ages to the War in Afghanistan. By Richard A. Gabriel. Potomac Books, 2013. $34.95. ISBN 978-1-6123-4420-1.
Much has been written about war, weapons, and technology, but few books cover the advent and development of military medicine as completely as Richard A. Gabriel’s marvelous history of military medicine during war.
This is a comprehensive, revealing look at military medicine as it struggled vainly to keep pace with the increased lethality of weapons through the ages, from the “squalid butchery” of swords and spears to gunpowder and bullets and the virulent diseases that ravaged armies for hundreds of years. Gabriel examines wars and armies from the Middle Ages to today, describing military medical theory and practice of the day.
He also explains early medical quackery and superstition; developments in battlefield wound and psychiatric care, personal hygiene, and field sanitation; and innovations like anesthesia, antiseptics, and vaccinations.
Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea. By Sheila Miyoshi Jager. W.W. Norton & Co., 2013. $35. ISBN 978-0-3930-6849-8.
To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Korean War armistice, historian Sheila Miyoshi Jager covers the Korean conflict from 1945, through the Korean War and the Cold War, to today’s increasing tension between a vibrant, democratic South Korea and an oppressed, starved, communist North Korea.
Jager presents the complete picture of the Korean “civil war,” a decades-old wound, supported and encouraged by the three superpowers — China, Russia, and the U.S.
She details Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung’s direct involvement, American and U.N. response, and the rifts between Stalin and Kim Il Sung, Mao and Nikita Khrushchev, and Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur and President Harry S. Truman, as well as North Korea’s threats from the Cold War. — William D. Bushnell
24 MILITARY OFFICER NOVEMBER 2013
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