Flight: A Celebration of 100 Years in Art and Literature

This collaboration with NASA (where two of the editors work; the other two are associated with the Smithsonian) celebrates the centenary of flight, marked by Wilbur and Orville Wright's invention of the airplane in 1903 (an excerpt from Orville's diary is included). Filled with full-color and black-and-white photos, this beautiful coffee-table book captures flight as the plane has matured into an instrument to wage war and a vehicle to reach the stars. But what really stand out are the works of art that the concept of flying has inspired--poems such as""On the Beaches of the Moon,"" by Archibald MacLeish or""Kitty Hawk,"" by Robert Frost; and such paintings as Airplane Flying, by Kazimir Malevich, Notre Avenir est dans l'Air, by Pablo Picasso, or Moonwalk 1, by Andy Warhol. This is an homage in the artistic sense, so historians flipping the pages won't find snapshots of fighter planes in combat, stills of Kitty Hawk's brief flight, or explosive rocket ship liftoffs.