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“In her new chic outfit, she looks like anything but a stewardess working. But work she does. Hard, too. And you hardly know it.” So read the text of a 1969 newspaper advertisement for Delta Airlines featuring a picture of a brightly smiling blond stewardess striding confidently down the aisle of an airplane cabin to deliver a meal.

From the moment the first stewardesses took flight in 1930, flight attendants became glamorous icons of femininity. For decades, airlines hired only young, attractive, unmarried white women. They marketed passenger service aloft as an essentially feminine exercise in exuding charm, looking fabulous, and providing comfort. The actual work that flight attendants did—ensuring passenger safety, assuaging fears, serving food and drinks, all while conforming to airlines’ strict rules about appearance—was supposed to appear effortless; the better that stewardesses performed by airline standards, the more hidden were their skills and labor. Yet today flight attendants are acknowledged safety experts; they have their own unions. Gone are the no-marriage rules, the mandates to retire by thirty-two. In Femininity in Flight, Kathleen M. Barry tells the history of flight attendants, tracing the evolution of their glamorized image as ideal women and their activism as trade unionists and feminists.

Barry argues that largely because their glamour obscured their labor, flight attendants unionized in the late 1940s and 1950s to demand recognition and respect as workers and self-styled professionals. In the 1960s and 1970s, flight attendants were one of the first groups to take advantage of new laws prohibiting sex discrimination. Their challenges to airlines’ restrictive employment policies and exploitive marketing practices (involving skimpy uniforms and provocative slogans such as “fly me”) made them high-profile critics of the cultural mystification and economic devaluing of “women’s work.” Barry combines attention to the political economy and technology of the airline industry with perceptive readings of popular culture, newspapers, industry publications, and first-person accounts. In so doing, she provides a potent mix of social and cultural history and a major contribution to the history of women’s work and working women’s activism.

In this rich group of stories about Latinos in the American Southwest, Skinner explores many themes. "Archangela's Place" features a wonderful Mexican character who weaves herself permanently into the lives of an Anglo family with enduring results. "Flight" tackles racial misunderstanding between an urban African-American and a rural Chicano woodcutter. Coming-of-age stories, "Eloy" and "Every Head's A World," illustrate in various degrees of tragedy and comedy the complexities faced by Hispanic-American youth. "Careful" is an ironic and humorous story of an encounter between two gay teenagers, one Hispanic and one Anglo, that is admirably honest and compelling in its sensuality. Among the rest are two pure romances, "Pickup," which is like a tormented country-western song, and "Spring," a witty story of love unrequited for forty years until, finally, the elderly lovers can openly and tenderly embrace in a passionate and charming conclusion. The stories in this collection show a wide range of compassion and understanding of the often confusing rules of love in a multicultural world.

Frank Waters, whose work has spanned half a century, has continually attempted to depict the reconciliation of opposites, to heal the national wounds of polarization.

Flight From Fiesta, Waters’ first novel in nearly two decades, is testimony to that aspiration, emerging as a moving and masterfully–told story of two characters who must discover the potential for common ground between their personalities.

Set in Santa Fe in the mid–fifties, the story itself is deceptively simple. Elsie, a spoiled, self–centered ten–year–old Anglo tourist girl, has come to the annual Fiesta with her divorced mother and her mother’s lover. When Elsie runs away from her hotel, she encounters Inocencio, an old alcoholic Pueblo Indian now reduced to selling pottery beneath the portal of the Palace of the Governors. With childish cunning she maneuvers Inocencio into taking her away with him. In the wake of the child’s disappearance, as the local posse–mentality intensifies and Inocencio is suspected of kidnapping and perhaps molesting her, the frightened Indian flees to the hills, taking Elsie with him on a week–long odyssey through the mountains, towns, and pueblos of New Mexico.

Waters’ eye is precise, providing sharp visual detail on very page. His ear is flawless, especially in his rendering of the laconic and stolid Indian speech patterns. All through his book there is an immediacy and a feel for place and culture that cannot be fabricated but must be gained, as Waters himself has gained it, through a lifetime among these people, these towns, and these mountains. The reconciliation of the two fugitives of Flight From Fiesta serves to point, not didactically or allegorically, but emotionally and spiritually, but emotionally and spiritually, to the possibility of the grander reconciliation that Waters envisions.

In his newest collection of poetry, Laurence Leiberman widens the scope of his previous Caribbean collections by drawing attention to the small enchanting islands of the Grenadines, a chain running between Grenada and St. Vincent. These outposts, often frequented by sailors, are mainly off the beaten tourist tracks. Lieberman’s poems bring to life all the overlooked people, hidden places, and indigenous but rarely seen animals which can be found on these islands.

These poems are as powerful as voodoo, full of energetic narratives in which Lieberman acts as observer while his characters—native “Caribs” and friends—guide us through the mystifying world of Guyana and the Caribbean: the planting of tree farms, local myths and religious sects, the daily crises of manual laborers working in the gold and diamond mines, and encounters with watras and harpy eagles.

Lieberman’s lines are rhythmic and strong; voices swirl in and out of his stanzas. From Lieberman’s own precise observations to his inclusion of Caribbean dialects, the language created here is deeply textured and unique. The majority of these poems are narratives, stories about a culture that is extremely attuned to the richness of its past. They remind their readers that no matter how diverse a society becomes, it remains irrevocably connected to the land it was born of and the plants and animals that struggle to survive in its midst.

The remarkable story of the golden plover’s annual migration, this beautifully illustrated nature title for young readers sees the small but mighty plover embark on a six-thousand-mile flight between the frozen Alaska tundra and gentle grassy slopes of the Hawaiian Islands. Equally at home in his two very different habitats, the once-endangered golden plover has evolved many behaviors and adaptations that make it perfectly well-suited to each of its homes, and this book contains many fascinating facts about them. Readers are also introduced to the plover’s neighbors and friends—from the giant Hawaiian goose, or nene, to the musk ox, grizzly bear, arctic fox, and sandhill crane.

Flight gives testament to the struggle of skin color in contemporary America. Utilizing both innovation and tradition, Chaun Ballard’s poems give voice to the silenced, proof to the disenfranchised, and life to the gone. “The poems in Flight unspool a rich and charmed history of survival into songs that celebrate the miracle of endurance in a country defined by the peculiar phenomenon of race; many of the poems in this collection explore (or allude to) the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson with a brilliance that is underscored by the poet’s extraordinary sense of sound to etch a new reality in our ears.” —Major Jackson

For Thomas Pynchon, the characteristic features of late capitalism—the rise of the military-industrial complex, consumerism, bureaucratization and specialization in the workplace, standardization at all levels of social life, and the growing influence of the mass media—all point to a transformation in the way human beings experience time and duration. Focusing on Pynchon’s novels as representative artifacts of the postwar period, Stefan Mattessich analyzes this temporal transformation in relation not only to Pynchon’s work but also to its literary, cultural, and theoretical contexts.

Mattessich theorizes a new kind of time—subjective displacement—dramatized in the parody, satire, and farce deployed through Pynchon’s oeuvre. In particular, he is interested in showing how this sense of time relates to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Examining this movement as an instance of flight or escape and exposing the beliefs behind it, Mattessich argues that the counterculture’s rejection of the dominant culture ultimately became an act of self-cancellation, a rebellion in which the counterculture found itself defined by the very order it sought to escape. He points to parallels in Pynchon’s attempts to dramatize and enact a similar experience of time in the doubling-back, crisscrossing, and erasure of his writing. Mattessich lays out a theory of cultural production centered on the ethical necessity of grasping one’s own susceptibility to discursive forms of determination.

Six weeks before Pearl Harbor, Keith Mason received a $150 uniform allowance, a pair of silver wings, and his first assignment as a flight instructor: Randolph Field, Texas. Two years later, he was Squadron Officer in the 460th Bomb Group, 15th Air Force in Spinazzola, Italy - flying the harrowing combat missions he dreamed of as a boy in rural Iowa.

As a memoir of one man’s war years, Mason provides insight on the inner workings of serving as an airman during World War II: facing stultifying boredom, stupefying incompetence, paralyzing fear, and stunning success. Details of how crews were selected for combat missions, of the necessity to occasionally break up crews, and of select missions in which Mason was a participant are important additions to the history and literature of this often neglected theater.

A riveting oral history/biography of a pioneering woman aviator.

This is the story of an uncommon woman--high school cheerleader, campus queen, airplane pilot, wife, mother, politician, business-woman--who epitomizes the struggles and freedoms of women in 20th-century America, as they first began to believe they could live full lives and demanded to do so. World War II offered women the opportunity to contribute to the work of the country, and Nancy Batson Crews was one woman who made the most of her privileged beginnings and youthful talents and opportunities.

In love with flying from the time she first saw Charles Lindbergh in Birmingham, (October 1927), Crews began her aviation career in 1939 as one of only five young women chosen for Civilian Pilot Training at the University of Alabama. Later, Crews became the 20th woman of 28 to qualify as an "Original" Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) pilot, employed during World War II shuttling P-38, P-47, and P-51 high-performance aircrafts from factory to staging areas and to and from maintenance and training sites. Before the war was over, 1,102 American women would qualify to fly Army airplanes. Many of these female pilots were forced out of aviation after the war as males returning from combat theater assignments took over their roles. But Crews continued to fly, from gliders to turbojets to J-3 Cubs, in a postwar career that began in California and then resumed in Alabama.

The author was a freelance journalist looking to write about the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) when she met an elderly, but still vital, Nancy Batson Crews. The former aviatrix held a reunion of the surviving nine WAFS for an interview with them and Crews, recording hours of her own testimony and remembrance before Crews's death from cancer in 2001. After helping lead the fight in the '70s for WASP to win veteran status, it was fitting that Nancy Batson Crews was buried with full military honors.

Reveals the transformation that occurred in Indian communities during the Spanish conquest of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico from 1492 to 1550

In Surviving Spanish Conquest: Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, Karen F. Anderson-Córdova draws on archaeological, historical, and ethnohistorical sources to elucidate the impacts of sixteenth-century Spanish conquest and colonization on indigenous peoples in the Greater Antilles. Moving beyond the conventional narratives of the quick demise of the native populations because of forced labor and the spread of Old World diseases, this book shows the complexity of the initial exchange between the Old and New Worlds and examines the myriad ways the indigenous peoples responded to Spanish colonization.
 
Focusing on Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, the first Caribbean islands to be conquered and colonized by the Spanish, Anderson-Córdova explains Indian sociocultural transformation within the context of two specific processes, out-migration and in-migration, highlighting how population shifts contributed to the diversification of peoples. For example, as the growing presence of “foreign” Indians from other areas of the Caribbean complicated the variety of responses by Indian groups, her investigation reveals that Indians who were subjected to slavery, or the “encomienda system,” accommodated and absorbed many Spanish customs, yet resumed their own rituals when allowed to return to their villages. Other Indians fled in response to the arrival of the Spanish.
 
The culmination of years of research, Surviving Spanish Conquest deftly incorporates archaeological investigations at contact sites copious use of archival materials, and anthropological assessments of the contact period in the Caribbean. Ultimately, understanding the processes of Indian-Spanish interaction in the Caribbean enhances comprehension of colonization in many other parts of the world. Anderson-Córdova concludes with a discussion regarding the resurgence of interest in the Taíno people and their culture, especially of individuals who self-identify as Taíno. This volume provides a wealth of insight to historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and those interested in early cultures in contact.

The essays turn about a single theme, the loss of the capacity to deal constructively with ambiguity in the modern era. Levine offers a head-on critique of the modern compulsion to flee ambiguity. He centers his analysis on the question of what responses social scientists should adopt in the face of the inexorably ambiguous character of all natural languages. In the course of his argument, Levine presents a fresh reading of works by the classic figures of modern European and American social theory—Durkheim, Freud, Simmel and Weber, and Park, Parsons, and Merton.

After decades of violence of all kinds, what remains are the stories. History is revised and debated, its protagonists bear witness, its writers ensure that all the suffering has not been in vain. These stories from Colombia contain pain and love, and sometimes even humor, allowing us to see an utterly vibrant and pulsating country amidst so much death and loss. We encounter townspeople overcome by fear, a man begging unsuccessfully for his life, an execution delayed for Christmas, the sounds and smells of burning coffee plantations, and other glimpses of daily life.  
    This anthology reflects some of Colombia’s finest literary talent, and most of these stories appear here for the first time in English translation. They reveal the contradictions and complexities of the human condition, yet they also offer hope for the future. In their bold revelations of the depths of despair, these writers provide gripping portrayals of humanity’s tenacious resistance to those very depths.

 

Best Books for Regional General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Association

What do a bumble bee and a 747 jet have in common? It’s not a trick question. The fact is they have quite a lot in common. They both have wings. They both fly. And they’re both ideally suited to it. They just do it differently.

Why Don’t Jumbo Jets Flap Their Wings? offers a fascinating explanation of how nature and human engineers each arrived at powered flight. What emerges is a highly readable account of two very different approaches to solving the same fundamental problems of moving through the air, including lift, thrust, turning, and landing. The book traces the slow and deliberate evolutionary process of animal flight—in birds, bats, and insects—over millions of years and compares it to the directed efforts of human beings to create the aircraft over the course of a single century.

Among the many questions the book answers:

• Why are wings necessary for flight?
• How do different wings fly differently?
• When did flight evolve in animals?
• What vision, knowledge, and technology was needed before humans could learn to fly?
• Why are animals and aircrafts perfectly suited to the kind of flying they do?

David E. Alexander first describes the basic properties of wings before launching into the diverse challenges of flight and the concepts of flight aerodynamics and control to present an integrated view that shows both why birds have historically had little influence on aeronautical engineering and exciting new areas of technology where engineers are successfully borrowing ideas from animals.