In a new era of global commerce, revolutionary technologies, and world war, the sheer exhileration of flight captured the imagination. Tom Crouch weaves the people, machines, and ideas of the air age into a compelling narrative. Yet the documentation of amateur enthusiasm in the face of practical reality and consequences does not simply offer a narrative of unalloyed progress. Moments of exhaltation are tempered by bitter disappointment and stark terror. Blind alleys are the price of technical progress. In the end, there is no more fascinating cast of characters than those who wrote the history in the sky. Theirs is an engaging story of realizing an extraordinary dream and riding it. TOM CROUCH is the author of the "sensitive and intelligent" (The Sunday Telegraph), "most readable, authoritative and balanced" (New Scientist), The Bishop's Boys (Norton). "Tom Crouch tells [the story] in huge detail and remarkably well" (The Guardian).