Amelia Earhart's Daughters: The Wild and Glorious Story of American Women Aviators from World War II to the Dawn of the Space Age

During WWII, a group of American women pilots under the leadership of the legendary Jacqueline Cochran shattered the aviation gender barrier by performing feats that, until then, women supposedly could not do. Under the auspices of the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), a division of the U.S. Air Force, Cochran's aviators flew some of the fastest and most dangerous aircraft of the day, including the P-51 Mustang fighter, notorious for taxing the strength and skill of its pilots. Because the story of the WASPs is already well known, Haynsworth, an advertising copywriter, and Toomey, who teaches English at Virginia Tech (Blacksburg), to their credit, use the Cochran/WASPs tale as a springboard for a series of lively chronicles of unsung female heroics. One of their best anecdotes involves a Chinese-American woman who crash-lands in a Texas field in 1943 while in training for the Air Force. The terrorized locals insist she's a Japanese invader until the pilot and her fellow soldiers stage a mock surrender. The authors present freshly angled details on a number of familiar episodes from other historical eras such as the U.S.-Soviet space race. The pioneering voyage of Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, is related with wit and drama so that, 35 years later, we're still relieved to read that her prolonged silence in orbit resulted not from death, as Soviet engineers feared, but because she'd fallen into a deep and weightless sleep. Informative, often gripping, this is a must-read for those who would understand the indelible contrail women in aviation and space flight have left in their wake since the invention of the airplane. Editor, Claire Wachtel; agent, David Hendin. (Aug.)