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Life Between the Levees is a chronicle of first-person reflections and folklore from pilots who have dedicated their lives to the river. The stories are as diverse as the storytellers themselves, and the volume is full of drama, suspense, and a way of life a "landlubber" could never imagine. Although waterways and ports in the Mississippi corridor move billions of dollars of products throughout the US and foreign markets, in today's world those who live and work on land have little knowledge of...

James Henry Banton was born in Burton on Trent in 1920\. He worked as a driver of a steam locomotive used to used to transport beer and supplies to breweries around the town. When war broke out Jim joined the RAF, eventually becoming a Leading Aircraftsman as part of the RAF's ground crew. During this time Jim had met the love of his life Dorothy Mason. Jim didn't know that when he left Gladstone Dock in Liverpool he would not see home or his family including Dorothy for another four and a half...

The heroic story of the founding of the US Navy during the American Revolution has been told before, yet missing from most maritime histories of the country’s first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels, from 20-foot whaleboats to 40-cannon men-of-war, that truly revealed the new nation’s character—above all, its ambition and entrepreneurial ethos. In Rebels at Sea, best-selling historian Eric Jay Dolin corrects that significant omission and contends that privateers, though often seen as pr...

Ira Jones' biography of Britain's top scoring ace of World War I has become the subject of some controversy over the last few years, most notably as it is the source of the claim of 73 "kills" for Mannock, thereby making him the number one scoring Allied Ace of the war. Later research has thrown serious doubt on this claim and indeed Mannock himself only claimed 51 kills. Jones' biography is nevertheless an important account, especially when seen in the context of the time in which it was firs...

'A soaring gift of a book' Owen Sheers'Remarkable' Mark Vanhoenacker, author of Skyfaring'Stunning . . . a love letter to nature' Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of LoveThe day she flew in a glider for the first time, Rebecca Loncraine fell in love. Months of gruelling treatment for breast cancer meant she had lost touch with the world around her, but in that engineless plane, soaring 3,000 feet over the landscape of her childhood, with only the rising thermals to take her higher and...

Sheila Scott was portrayed by the press during the 1960s and early 1970s as a glamorous and courageous record breaking heroine of the air, one of the few pioneering pilots of her generation. Although this was an accurate reflection of her achievements, there were other aspects of her extraordinary personality and experience which remained hidden. Between 1965 and 1972, she captured the public imagination with long distance solo flights, performing solitary feats of endurance where no solo pilot...

In August 1943, a highly classified US Army Air Force unit, code-named the “Wright Project,” departed Langley Field for Guadalcanal in the South Pacific to join the fight against the Empire of Japan. Operating independently, under sealed orders drafted at the highest levels of Army Air Force, the Wright Project was unique, both in terms of the war-fighting capabilities provided by classified systems the ten B-24 Liberators of this small group of airmen brought to the war, and in the success thes...

Charles Rolls was the first Englishman to be killed in an air crash. He was thirty years old. Rolls' death shocked the country and made headlines across the world. His relative youth at the time is perhaps the reason that he is a forgotten hero; a man who today receives little credit for the legacy that he left behind, even though at the time of his death on July 12th 1910 he was one of the most famous men in the country. His loss was regarded as a national tragedy. Today he is most famous for t...