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Reading John Hulls' book recaptured for me a sense of that wonder in the awesome feat of flying. Cody and the Wright brothers became more than just clever engineers, they were ingenious and daring pioneers who put their own lives on the line, rising hundreds of feet in the air supported by nothing more than bamboo and canvas. Cody's madcap adventures (cow hand, gold miner, variety show creator, Royal Aeronotical Society member, etc..) would make a wild story in any age, but are particularly resonant on the brink of the centennial of flight.
Hulls' book, though aimed at children, is informative and interesting for anyone fascinated by flying and the art of invention. Here is a simple story well told: the writing is clear and evocative, the characters come alive on the page, and once again history is a story worth telling.
The show's success, with roles for all his family, enabled Cody to indulge his kite habit on a grand scale, shown in the book's many fine photos. In 1901 they built the first practical man-carrying kite (woman-carrying, too--Lela shown in a photo aloft in formal hat and long dress, the first woman to fly in a heavier-than-air craft). The Royal Navy and then the Army bought Cody's kites, leading Cody to friendship with Colonel Capper, a British army officer ostensibly developing balloons for artillery observation but actually harboring visions of flight.
Cody and Capper collaborated in leading England into the age of flight. They buzzed Buckingham Palace and the War Office with their powered airship, then developed a hang-glider kite, finally "Army Airplane #1." Capper, who knew the Wrights, risked his career in supporting Cody but Cody went on to repeated triumphs, winning the first British military aircraft trials in 1912. The very next year Cody died tragically in an aircraft accident. The British army buried him with full military honours after a procession attended by 50,000 mourners representing every British army regiment.
Pilots who write about flying often evoke magic. Hulls writes with the clarity and humour of St. Exupery, Gann, Bach and the handful of pilots whose love of flight becomes literature. The chapter "Flyers and Liars" captures the risk of early flight and the achievements of the Wrights and Cody, quoting the 1906 NEW YORK HERALD: "Despite extravagant claims, history would show that by 1908 only five humans had acquired significant time flying heavier-than-air machines. Two were dead--Otto Lilienthal and Percy Pilcher, a Scots engineer who had studied with him, died in flying accidents." Cody and the Wrights were the only ones with more than brief seconds in heavier-than-air flight. In all the other claims, no one knew enough to ask the key question: "How did you learn to fly?"
Coupled with illustrator David Weitzman's illustrations of what it took to learn even to make a simple turn, Hulls depicts the Wrights' and Cody's bravery and brilliance as they risked death to master flight. Among Cody's inventions: the variable-pitch propeller, whose efficiency Cody tested by tethering his airplane to a tree at Farnborough (a flight-test locale that became, decades earlier, the British equivalent of Edwards AFB). When the tree died recently, the RAE honored Cody by recreating the tree in aluminium on its original site.
While directed at younger readers, "Rider" is a wonderful book for anyone of any age interested in great American characters such as Cody and the Wrights, a must for pilots or indeed anyone with a love of flight or who today flies safely in a modern airliner.
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My brothers and I avidly collected these moths at night, in the rural North Carolina mountains. It was thrilling to see them dart around the street lamps like fiery jewels. Unfortunately, most books on this subject feature photos of pinned, faded samples. I've always felt it was a shame people couldn't experience their enchanting magic like we did. John Cody's book does that.
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This book is a fascinating psychoanalytic reading of ED's tortured life, by a professional psychiatrist who devoted seven years to it, and is unsparing of the falsifications indulged in by most of her biographers and critics. ED cultists, in particular, loathe the book (always a good sign) because it gives us a very human and very tormented Emily Dickinson, a woman starved for love who had serious psychological problems which retarded her emotional development, and who almost certainly suffered a nervous breakdown as a result.
Why any of this should disturb the open-minded I have no idea. The Dickinson household was certainly a very strange and abnormal place, and the Dickinson children had a far from normal upbringing. The aloofness of the father, his inability to show love or warmth and relate in a normal fashion to his children, would have a devastating effect on any child.
The arguments I have seen against Cody have been very weak, though proof of the rightness of his thesis is very strong. It runs all through the poems and has been analyzed in great detail by Camille Paglia in Chapter 24 of her _Sexual Personae_ 'Amherst's Madame de Sade : Emily Dickinson' (pp.623-74).
The poems Paglia quotes are authentic Dickinson poems. No matter how much worshippers at the shrine of their 'Saint Emily' would like to wish them away, they will not go away. Also, they have meaning.
My advice would be to read both Cody and Paglia. They're both fascinating writers, they both know what they're talking about, and I think that what they say helps us to understand aspects of both Dickinson and many of the poems she wrote.
Emily Dickinson was a very complex figure, and everyone tries to claim her for their camp - Cultists, Christians, Psychiatrists, Sadeians, etc., - but I guess the truth is that, although there's a certain amount of truth in all these positions, Emily Dickinson is just too big to be contained. She bursts free of all categories. Like her poems she explodes into a multiplicity of meanings, perhaps because, like them she wasn't about something, but about everything.
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The range of poses is great too - from some very classical poses to some really "out-there" angles and poses which border on contortionism. Some of the most beautiful poses in this book are ones which a live model couldn't hold for more than 2-5 minutes, so having it captured on paper is a real bonus. All in all, I wuold say that the combination of poses and camera angles provides a fantastic reference work for studying the muscles of the body in various states of tension and compression.
I think I'm going to be spending lot of time drawing from this book.
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