Aviation Enthusiast's Library: 37 Books on Airplanes gathers a capacious body of early and popular aeronautical writing, tracing flight from technical curiosity to emblem of modern adventure. Its selections range across instructional exposition, engineering-minded description, speculative fiction, juvenile adventure, travel narrative, and popular science. Together, these works register the exhilaration and uncertainty of aviation's formative public culture, where the airplane appears vario...

The thrilling story of how the airplane grew and the part it has played in the war and peace-time history of the United States of America.Over 150 illustrations in color of america’s most famous airplanes—old and new

In "The Story of American Aviation," Jim Ray meticulously chronicles the evolution of aviation in the United States, weaving together a rich tapestry of technological innovation, cultural shifts, and historical milestones. Ray's narrative style is both engaging and accessible, seamlessly blending factual recounting with personal anecdotes and vivid descriptions. Through a chronological lens, he examines pivotal events, from the Wright brothers' first powered flight to the space age's trans...

In The Luck of the Fall, characters get lost; they fall, but the falls shape their lives in ways that might even be called “lucky”—if luck is defined as survival, despite the scars left behind. They take consolation in their lack of prizes, in the clarity of their failures, while approaching the future with gallows humor and faith in cynicism. Some stories read like dramatic monologues in the longer play of lives along Eight Mile Road on the edge of Detroit, a landmark location th...

True belief is a hard thing to come by, especially in a world that seems to constantly suppress its birth, much less its maintenance. In One Half Crown from Hoboken, Jim Ray shares a tapestry of stories that take you along on his journey from rickety to genuine belief-one of biting humor, madcap mischief, bittersweet sadness, and nagging doubt-with an array of unforgettable real-life characters.It culminates in an unexpected and astonishing tale of adoption ... and a closi...

Exceedingly, abundantly above anything you can ask or think! How is that possible? Our eternal God is already present in the future! How do we know?He has provided us with hundreds of promises and prophecies hundreds, even thousands, of years in advance that have been specifically fulfilled! His answers to our prayers are on the way before we even know there is a need for us to pray!Jims life is a testimony of Gods advance provision during his three quarters of a century. Y...

Trigger Man is a superb collection of stories capturing the gritty spirit of Detroit and the sometimes grim circumstances of the characters shaped by its industry and economics. Grounded on the bleak streets of the Motor City, these stories also explore the mythical “Up North,” the idealized country of many Detroit workers’ fantasy—an escape from the concrete and metal reality of their daily lives. Daniels’ characters are resilient and defiant, inhabiting a world that has often pl...

In these linked stories, the constants are the places—from Eight Mile High, the local high school, to Eight Miles High, the local bar; from The Clock, a restaurant that never closes, to Stan’s, a store that sells misfit clothes. Daniels’s characters wander Detroit, a world of concrete, where even a small strip of greenery becomes a hideout for mystery and mayhem. Even when they leave town—to Scout camp, or Washington, DC, or the mythical Up North, they take with them their hardscrabble wor...