cover image Fire and Air: A Life on the Edge

Fire and Air: A Life on the Edge

Patty Wagstaff. Chicago Review Press, $24.95 (330pp) ISBN 978-1-55652-310-6

In 1991 and again in 1992, Wagstaff won the U.S. Aerobatics Championship, the first woman to triumph in this largely male sport of performing stunts in airplanes. But her road to the title, as revealed in this autobiography written with Cooper (Rising Above It), was painful and arduous going back to childhood. An Air Force brat, Wagstaff was an adventurous and rebellious child and adolescent whose alcoholic parents treated her repressively and viciously. After stints in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s and Australia in the 1970s, she ended up in Alaska and, thanks to her second husband, learned to fly and found her metier when she took her first aerobatics lesson. Building a career in that field, financed in large part by appearances in air shows, Wagstaff became a virtual monomaniac about flying, causing her marriage to collapse. Her book is a touch haphazard, involving superficial Zen philosophy and trite poetry about flight as freedom mixed with absorbing accounts of near-disasters and life in the frozen North. Those who fly will soar aloft with Wagstaff; others will remain earthbound. (June)