Enduring Courage: Ace Pilot Eddie Rickenbacker and the Dawn of the Age of Speed

This biography of a legendary WWI combat ace explores a career spent courting danger at the frontiers of technical invention. Raised in poverty, Rickenbacker matured early into a driven man with a “preternatural quickness” for acquiring mechanical engineering skills in the custom car workshops of 1900’s Columbus, Ohio. He soon used this mechanical aptitude, along with an “abundance of moxie,” to master the new sport of motorcar racing. Graduating to the theater of WWI, he enters the “race to ace,” gaining a reputation as a fighter pilot and mounting the kill record of a “precisely murderous” pilot, whose raw skill and intuition in the cockpit earned him military advancement at war and celebrity treatment at home. Former Smithsonian magazine editor Ross has a knack for exciting, visual narrative, and the life-defining moments of race and dogfight are made particularly visceral through inclusion of technical details that enrich the drama. Though lacking much exploration of Rickenbacker’s later life—the treatment of his longer civilian life primarily revolves around an unbelievable survival adrift at sea—this is a highly entertaining, if incomplete, portrait, which reveres its subject as a hero defined by his high-speed feats. Maps and photos. (May)