In much the same way that views of the earth from the Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s led indirectly to the inauguration of Earth Day and the modern environmental movement, the dawn of aviation ushered in a radically new way for architects, landscape designers, urban planners, geographers, and archaeologists to look at cities and landscapes. As icons of modernity, airports facilitated the development of a global economy during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, reshaping the way people thought about the world around them. Professionals of the built environment awoke to the possibilities offered by the airports themselves as sites of design and by the electrifying new aerial perspective on landscape. In Flights of Imagination, Sonja Dümpelmann follows the evolution of airports from their conceptualization as landscapes and cities to modern-day plans to turn decommissioned airports into public urban parks. The author discusses landscape design and planning activities that were motivated, legitimized, and facilitated by the aerial view. She also shows how viewing the earth from above redirected attention to bodily experience on the ground and illustrates how design professionals understood the aerial view as simultaneously abstract and experiential, detailed and contextual, harmful and essential. Along the way, Dümpelmann traces this multiple dialectic from the 1920s to the land-camouflage activities during World War II, and from the environmental and landscape planning initiatives of the 1960s through today.

A bold, incisive look at race and reparative writing in American fiction, by the author of Your Face in Mine White Flights is a meditation on whiteness in American fiction and culture from the end of the civil rights movement to the present. At the heart of the book, Jess Row ties “white flight”—the movement of white Americans into segregated communities, whether in suburbs or newly gentrified downtowns—to white writers setting their stories in isolated or emotionally insulated landscapes, from the mountains of Idaho in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping to the claustrophobic households in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Row uses brilliant close readings of work from well-known writers such as Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, and David Foster Wallace to examine the ways these and other writers have sought imaginative space for themselves at the expense of engaging with race. White Flights aims to move fiction to a more inclusive place, and Row looks beyond criticism to consider writing as a reparative act. What would it mean, he asks, if writers used fiction “to approach each other again”? Row turns to the work of James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison, and James Alan McPherson to discuss interracial love in fiction, while also examining his own family heritage as a way to interrogate his position. A moving and provocative book that includes music, film, and literature in its arguments, White Flights is an essential work of cultural and literary criticism.

Life is filled with emotional highs and lows. Riding the wave of this experience is part of living, but for poet Bernadette Bland, dreaming was even more important. No matter the attitude, mood, or circumstance, Ms. Bland has always believed in the beauty of life. Never to be deterred from her hearts desire, she has ridden her own life wave with an eye to her dreams and an eye to the beauty of nature. In her new poetry collection, Flights of Fancy, Ms. Bland shares her imagery with the outside world. She delves into the lavish splendor of nature in Drifting Grace: Gods Art Show. She peers behind the protective mask of a weeping clown in Behind the Mask. She recalls watching her mother slowly grow old in the poignant Mama. In all her words, she reveals her deepest yearnings and fears with selfless honesty. Flights of Fancy is an example of an imagination set free. Ms. Bland fills her poetry with wonder and will leave you longing to step out into the sun. She is not afraid to depict the sometimes traumatic rollercoaster of life; yet she encourages us to move on, move up, and not look back. Within every word, she calls to the reader, challenging each one of us to never stop dreaming!

Performing Flight sheds new light on moments in the history of US aviation and spaceflight through the lens of performance studies. From pioneering aviator Bessie Coleman to the emerging industry of space tourism, performance has consistently shaped public perception of the enterprise of flight and has guaranteed its success as a mode of entertainment, travel, research, and warfare. The book reveals fundamental connections between performance and human aviation and space travel over the past 100 years, beginning with the early aerial entertainers known as barnstormers (named after itinerant 19th century theater troupes) to the performative history of the Enola Gay and its pilot Paul Tibbets, who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, thus ushering in the atomic age. The book also explores the phenomenon of “the pilot voice”; the creation of the American Astronaut, on whose performative success the Cold War, the Space Race, and funding of the US Space Program all depended; and the performative strategies employed to cement notions of space tourism as both manifest destiny and an escape route from a failed planet. A final chapter addresses the four hijacked flights of 9/11 and their representations in discourse and in memorials. Performing Flight effectively and imaginatively demonstrates the ways in which performance and flight in the United States have been inextricably linked for more than a century.

Grade level: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, k, p, e, i, t.

Skillfully wending words, sounds, and images, author/illustrator,Colonel Korne paints poetic pictures that catapult readers into awitty world of rhymes. Whether weaving a web of intrigue in "Spider,Spider," rhapsodizing reminiscently in "Memories of Grandpa," or theprovocative pun in "Honeydew, Honeydew," he hits the heart, not withsap, but with a refreshing twist that draws in everyone who picks upthis unique volume. Children's poetry? Hardly, but make no mistake.Kids love the Colonel. Adults will chuckle at the double entendresresplendent in the Colonel's work and identify with the trials thatvex characters like Emily Lou, the hippo ballerina. All ages willrelish the artwork that ranges from realism to cartoon sketches.Educators will appreciate the natural use of literary devices: "TheButterfly" as a picture poem, the synonyms in "I Lost My UnderwearToday", as well as wonderful examples of irony, alliteration, andmetaphor replete in this masterfully written work.