books:

	• The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed John McPhee Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992 - 186 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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I knew very little about 'lighter-than-air' history or technology before reading _Pumpkin Seed_, but McPhee assumes no prior knowledge. Indeed, one of the things I like best about McPhee is his ability to explain topics of a complex nature to a lay audience.

The story's 'characters' are exquisitely developed, and their interactions with each other are sometimes tragic, often hillarious. A number of them would make fascinating subjects for biographies in their own right.

If you have any interest in avaiation history, or just enjoy reading a well-crafted non-fiction work, I highly recommend this book.

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For a sense of wonder and anticipation that stays with you

This is the first McPhee book I ever read-- way back when it first came out. How well I remember it! How many years I have continued to look for news of the needed technology for large scale commercial use of lighter than air craft finally being mastered (and we still seem on the brink of making it work). A bookstore clerk had told me as I picked up the book, "That is one strange book. We do not know where to put it. Should it be in history, science, biography, reference, the technology section on air craft, business? No place seems quite right." I knew I would read more books by McPhee after this exquisite find, but I did not expect the next one to be on-- oranges! What a book The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed is; what a writer McPhee is. His books always leave you with the feeling that you now have a special insight into something out of the ordinary. And indeed you do.

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Weird, prolix prose

I was disappointed to find the book has almost nothing to do with Solomon Andrews, he only rates five pages. Most of it is the mundane story of a group of well-meaning but inept lunatics trying to build and fly an "aerobody"--a "wingless" airplane shaped vaguely like one of Andrews' claimed balloon designs. (They sort of succeed, but the Aereon company goes broke a few weeks later and eventually the craft is put in permanent storage.)

Obviously the airplane (airplane? airplane!) had a wing, it just didn't look like one. Someday I will build the "crumpled-paper airplane" where I hang a motor underneath a giant piece of crumpled paper... perhaps I can call it a "crumpulator".

McPhee's writing is a little strange, and many words are used in slightly odd ways. It's not horrible, but not good. (I'm not anxious to read any of his other books, let's put it that way.)

The story itself is predictable, if you're familiar with the history of mad scientists with mediocre ideas. The design is kept in secret; the first N all-in attempts catastrophically fail on their first try; inadequate testing; absurd visionary dreams; insufficient funding; infighting; religious mania; suppression by "the man". It was interesting to read, but only in the same way watching a dot-com fail in slow motion is interesting.

I'm very interested in learning about Andrews and whether his designs ever actually existed (and worked), but this isn't the place to find out.

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This is the fascinating story of the dream of a completely new aircraft, a hybrid of the plane and the rigid airship - huge, wingless, moving slowly through the lower sky. John McPhee chronicles the perhaps unfathomable perseverance of the aircraft's sucessive progenitors.

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