Bookshelf

An amazing life

Chuck Yeager: What a Ride!

General Charles “Chuck” Yeager died in 2020. His second wife, of 17 years, Victoria D’Angelo Yeager, first wrote about her husband’s witticisms in 101 Chuck Yeagerisms (“Bookshelf: Love Story,” AOPA Pilot May 2023) but she had so much more to tell about her life and love with the first pilot to break the sound barrier. In What a Ride! she tells personal stories of the couple’s life together, pulled from her diaries. There are more than 21 years of stories of flying, travel, and personalities in this heartfelt book dedicated to Yeager: “This book is dedicated to my late great husband, General Chuck Yeager, who always wanted to write a book about us, but we were too busy enjoying life to sit down and chronicle it, so now here it is, in part.” A private pilot, Victoria Yeager also shares photos of the couple’s flying life together in this volume from The Right Stuff Publishing.

Wildfire

Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting

“Here’s the thing most people don’t realize about fighting wildfires—the job generally consists of the following: Prolonged periods of boredom and restlessness punctuated by bursts of almost unfathomable intensity or violence,” so writes Tim Sheehy in his book on aerial firefighting. Blending historical context and first-person narrative, Sheehy tells a dramatic and colorful story, one he knows well. As a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, former Navy SEAL, firefighting pilot, and the founder of the Bozeman, Montana-based aerial firefighting team Bridger Aerospace, Sheehy provides firsthand accounts of the war on wildfires in a “rollicking read.” Proceeds from the sale of Mudslingers are donated to the Montana Firefighter Fund and the United Aerial Firefighters Association.

Honor your father

Fighting the Night: Iwo Jima, World War II, and a Flyer’s Life

Writers keep ideas for stories in their heads for a long time before ever putting them down on paper (or computer as may be). For author Paul Hendrickson, the story of his father, a combat pilot in World War II who volunteered for night fighters and the legendary P–61 Black Widow, has played around in his mind since his father’s death in 2003. That a 25-year-old young man from Kentucky would leave his wife and two young sons to fight in battles previously unimagined, kept Hendrickson from knowing his father well until late in their lives.

Hendrickson, the award-winning writer of Sons of Mississippi, The Living and the Dead, and Hemingway’s Boat, pays tribute to the service of young men—and the women who stayed home or traveled with them—in a time of war. Fighting the Night is “an intense and powerful story of violence and love, forgiveness and loss, fathers and sons.” And a son’s quest to know his father.