ECHOES OF EAGLES: A Son's Search for His Father and the Legacy of America's First Fighter Pilots

The son of a WWI aviator and a freelance writer have produced an absorbing and readable biography of the senior author's father. A middle-class Bostonian, Charles H. Woolley entered the war as a volunteer ambulance driver, then transferred to the U.S. Air Service. There he went through the nerve-wracking training process, flew Nieuport 28s (which often shed wings) and Spad XIII's (which sometimes didn't fly at all) with the 95th and 49th Aero Squadrons. He ended the war as a major with two kills. He never got flying out of his blood, either, working with Amelia Earhart and serving in WWII, before his death in 1962. The narrative assembled from his diaries and by painstaking interviews and research by the younger Woolley brings out the triumphs and disasters, the tragedies, follies, primitive equipment and partying of that generation of pilots. It also paints vivid portraits of many of Woolley's comrades, including the gallant Quentin Roosevelt, the former president's youngest son who was killed in action, and the strait-laced Waldo Heinrichs, who became a POW. The account is all the more accessible because of the amount of background information given to orient the reader on WWI aviation in general (while avoiding extremes of gritty realism, romantic cliché or techno-babble overkill), making the book of value for this year's aviation centennial. (Nov. 10)