Showing results for "Wing Man" in Biographies & Memoirs

Today most people remember Leonardo for his few surviving anatomically correct works of art. They forget that Leonardo spent most of his life experimenting and designing automated machines. He constantly observed the mechanics of nature. He dissected human bodies, carefully recording the workings of muscles and organs. He studied optics, sound and light, gravity, heliocentric celestial mechanics, physical geology, fluid dynamics, and especially the flight of birds.

In 1990, while serving a sentence in San Quentin for armed robbery, Jarvis Jay Masters was implicated as an accessory in the murder of a prison guard. A 23-year-old Black man, Jarvis was sentenced to death in the gas chamber. While in the maximum security section of Death Row, using the only instrument available to him—a ball-point pen filler—Masters's astounding memoir is a testament to the tenacity of the human spirit and the talent of a fine writer.

As the memoir of an aerobatic master born to fling his body through cloudbanks, Spitfire Wingman from Tennessee offers a unique birds-eye view of events and personalities of WWII and the Cold War. Encounters with Patton, Vandenberg, Yeager, Truman and Nixon are replayed with perception and wit. While jockeying P-40s, P-51s, and P-47s, he was privileged to see the war both from twenty thousand feet and as a Staff Officer at 9th Air Force HQ in Brussels.

At twenty-three, Kayli Stollak, like most starry-eyed twenty-somethings, assumed that she and her boyfriend, Charlie, would be together forever. Besides a rockin' sex life, they shared a passion for motorcycle adventures, hedonistic European music festivals, and wearing matching glittery spandex to the disco. What more could a gal ask for? She envisioned their love burning well into their sixties.

Gina has no intention of marrying again following a disastrous divorce. She wants to focus on raising her son and building a career, not falling in love. But then she meets a spirited airman named David Scheff and everything changes. It doesn’t take long for him to convince her that marrying her soul mate might be a good idea after all. A member of the Air Force, David eventually becomes the flight chief for Air Force One, giving Gina the opportunity to shake hands with presidents William Jefferson Clinton and George W. Bush. It’s a great adventure!