Here are 80 books that Valkyrie fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a NASA Flight Controller and crewman on the high-altitude research aircraft, I met many pilots, including those who flew X-planes. I became passionate about extreme and experimental flying. I have experienced supersonic flight and have flown to 70,000 feet. These experiences motivated me to write three books about X-planes: Stratonauts, X-59: Lowering the Sonic Boom, and X-66A: Bracing for the Future.
While scientists in Germany and the U.S. studied aerodynamics and compressibility in wind tunnels long before WW II, no one had “broken the sound barrier” in level flight. Some thought it actually was a barrier to faster flight. Of course, many WW II fighter pilots wanted to be the one to break it.
On October 14, 1947, the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis, piloted by U.S. Air Force Captain Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, became the first airplane to fly faster than the speed of sound, reaching 1,127 kilometers (700 miles) per hour (Mach 1.06). Peter Davies traces the Bell X-1, from its early development through to the influence it had on military and civilian jets in the second half of the 20th century. Someday, the average airline passenger will experience a supersonic flight.
In 1947, no one knew if it was possible to break the 'sound barrier'. The Bell X-1 was the tiny, rocket-powered craft that finally broke it. It was the result of innovative designers and engineers turning their attention from the pioneering jets of World War II to a new task - an aircraft designed purely to fly faster than sound. Legendary pilots rallied to the cause, with World War II ace Chuck Yeager piloting the X-1 when it finally achieved supersonic flight in 1947, the first manned craft to reach such speeds. With historical photographs and meticulously researched digital art,…
As a NASA Flight Controller and crewman on the high-altitude research aircraft, I met many pilots, including those who flew X-planes. I became passionate about extreme and experimental flying. I have experienced supersonic flight and have flown to 70,000 feet. These experiences motivated me to write three books about X-planes: Stratonauts, X-59: Lowering the Sonic Boom, and X-66A: Bracing for the Future.
This book describes the very beginning of experimental flights at the Muroc Bombing and Gunnery Range. When the U.S. entered WWII, it began looking for an isolated location to conduct flight testing of Top-Secret aircraft. Muroc provided the ideal location for cutting-edge flight research on the turbojet revolution.
After the end of the War in 1946, however, a new type of research activity designed to explore the most challenging unknowns of flight began. This was the dawn of the “X-Planes.” Today, this place is called Edwards Air Force Base.
Edwards Air Force Base began life in September 1933 as the Muroc Bombing and Gunnery Range. By early 1942 the Flight Test Division at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio began looking for an isolated location to conduct flight testing of Top Secret aircraft. The 44-square mile Rogers Dry Lake located nearby the training base at Muroc provided the ideal location. Eventually, all of America’s early jets, both Air Force and Navy, underwent flight testing at Muroc, which quickly became synonymous with the cutting edge flight research of the turbojet revolution. By 1946, however, a new type of research activity designed…
As a NASA Flight Controller and crewman on the high-altitude research aircraft, I met many pilots, including those who flew X-planes. I became passionate about extreme and experimental flying. I have experienced supersonic flight and have flown to 70,000 feet. These experiences motivated me to write three books about X-planes: Stratonauts, X-59: Lowering the Sonic Boom, and X-66A: Bracing for the Future.
This book is written by someone who really knows the program and the Mach 3 airplane. Milton O. Thompson, a pilot active in the X-15 program from beginning to end, tells the dramatic story of one of the most successful research aircraft ever flown. I personally have met three of the 12 X-15 pilots: Neil Armstrong, Joe Engle (both from my NASA days), and Scott Crossfield, whom I met at an Experimental Aircraft Association meeting.
The book not only describes the aircraft, the flights, and the pilots but the NACA Langley Research Center’s wind tunnel work on aerodynamic heating and transfer, stability and control, and hypersonic turbulent boundary layer data for aircraft performance.
In At the Edge of Space, Milton O. Thompson, a pilot active in the X-15 program from beginning to end, tells the dramatic story of one of the most successful research aircraft ever flown.
As a NASA Flight Controller and crewman on the high-altitude research aircraft, I met many pilots, including those who flew X-planes. I became passionate about extreme and experimental flying. I have experienced supersonic flight and have flown to 70,000 feet. These experiences motivated me to write three books about X-planes: Stratonauts, X-59: Lowering the Sonic Boom, and X-66A: Bracing for the Future.
The book starts with the second flight; he has already broken the sound barrier. His writing style grabs you. After his WW II experiences, he knows that he is in a very dangerous business: that of a test pilot. In 1953, he flew a Russian MiG that had fallen into U.S. hands, being the first American to do so. That December, he set a new speed record, pushing past Mach 2 in a Bell X-1A.
Every pilot knows about this national hero. This book also describes his many commands and his role in training the astronauts as head of the Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School. At 89, he flew past Mach 1 again to celebrate the 65th Anniversary of his breaking the sound barrier
#1 MULTI-MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER • A one-of-a-kind portrait of a true American hero: General Chuck Yeager
“The secret of my success is that I always managed to live to fly another day.”
General Chuck Yeager was the greatest test pilot of them all—the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound . . . the World War II flying ace who shot down a Messerschmitt jet with a prop-driven P-51 Mustang . . . the hero who defined a certain quality that all hotshot fly-boys of the postwar era aimed to achieve: the right stuff.
Major league baseball stadiums have always enthralled me—their architectures, their atmospheres, their surroundings. Each has a unique story to tell. So I decided to tell the story of how perhaps the greatest of all American ballparks, Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, came to be. As an urban historian, I also wished to tell a broader story of how the argument between 1957 and 1962 over whether, where, and how to build the stadium helped make Los Angeles into the modern city we know today. So writing City of Dreamsallowed me to combine my passions for baseball, for stadiums, and for the history of American cities.
The most comprehensive history of the American baseball stadium ever produced, and one that could only have been written by Paul Goldberger, America’s preeminent architectural critic. Unlike many of his brethren, Goldberger’s writing has always been clean, clear, and blissfully jargon-free, and his historical tour of ballparks from their inauspicious 19th century beginnings to the retro pleasure-and-marketing palaces of our own time is authoritative and wonderfully readable.
An exhilarating, splendidly illustrated, entirely new look at the history of baseball: told through the stories of the vibrant and ever-changing ballparks where the game was and is staged, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic.
From the earliest corrals of the mid-1800s (Union Grounds in Brooklyn was a "saloon in the open air"), to the much mourned parks of the early 1900s (Detroit's Tiger Stadium, Cincinnati's Palace of the Fans), to the stadiums we fill today, Paul Goldberger makes clear the inextricable bond between the American city and America's favorite pastime. In the changing locations and architecture of our ballparks,…
As the authors of 27 hand-illustrated books, we are acutely aware of the time and skill required for good rendering. We are old-schoolers ourselves, having cut our teeth on “how-to” books before computers came into vogue. Our readers often tell us that a computer drawing does not have the same appeal and clarity as hand drawing. We are able to ‘talk’ a reader through the process of building something with our drawings. We have also found that the best illustrated books often have the best content!
This is an oldie but goodie. It speaks to our own love of simple structures, designed to get you out in nature. The illustrations are simpler but fit in very well with the language of the era, and the personal philosophy of the author. There are floor plans, cabin renderings, and many smaller illustrations of the tools and furnishings that might go into a simple cabin. It is more than a how-to book. It is a celebration of cabin-living writ large.
For 70 years, readers have been enjoying Meinecke's classic odes to the simple life, Your Cabin in the Woods (1943) and Cabin Craft and Outdoor Living (1947). For the first time, these books are combined into a deluxe two-color vintage package, featuring hundreds of charming illustrations by Victor Aures, known for his work with the Boy Scouts of America.
In writing both practical and inspirational, Meinecke details how to turn your dream into a reality, from building plans to choosing land to using tools. However the book's enduring appeal owes in large part to its warmly engaging tone and firm…
Mark Ovenden is a broadcaster, lecturer and author who specialises in the design of public transport. His books include ’Transit Maps of The World’ - an Amazon Top 100 best-seller - and a dozen others covering cartography, architecture, typography, way finding and history of urban transit systems, airline routes and railway maps. He has spoken on these subjects across the World and is a regular on the UK's Arts Society lecture circuit. His television and radio programmes for the BBC have helped to explain the joys of good design and urban architecture. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and after many years living in cities like London, Paris, New York and Manchester…now enjoys a more rural life on the Isle of Wight.
With a razor sharp eye Wolmar (author of many other excellent books on railway history) concentrates his focus on the machinations of the establishment of the world's first railway built under the ground. Overcoming the travails of unbuilt fantasy concepts, the Victorians fear of the dark, finances and the problems of running steam trains in tunnels, London's City Solicitor Charles Pearson, managed to get the first route, the Metropolitan Railway, built and opened by January 1863. Wolmar unpicks the struggles to expand the line, private capitals, a rush to build more lines and the eventual nationalisation of the system in 1948.
Revised and updated edition of Christian Wolmar's classic history of the London Underground, with a new chapter on Crossrail.
'I can think of few better ways to while away those elastic periods awaiting the arrival of the next eastbound Circle Line train than by reading [this book].' Tom Fort, Sunday Telegraph
Since the Victorian era, London's Underground has played a vital role in the daily life of generations of Londoners. In The Subterranean Railway, Christian Wolmar celebrates the vision and determination of the nineteenth-century pioneers who made the world's first, and still the largest, underground passenger railway: one of the…
I have read most of the books written about Apollo, especially those ostensibly written by my fellow participants. I have read these books for pleasure, to find out about parts of the moon effort that I did not see first-hand, and to learn what I could from the authors’ mistakes and successes — with a view to the writing of my own book. The books I have come to value the most are the books that seem to have been created for some other reason than commercial gain, the books unmarred by ghostwriting or heavy-handed editing, the books where the author’s authentic voice speaks from the page.
Eldon Hall led the development of the Apollo Guidance Computer, that one-cubic-foot device with 76kb of memory that navigated, guided, and controlled each of the Apollo spacecraft — the machine that I helped program. His book is both a detailed description of the Apollo computer and a history of its development. The most dramatic chapter chronicles the bold decision to use integrated circuits in the design of the computer — all of the same type, to encourage the vendor to keep making them — although that technology was then anything but reliable.
The first of its kind, Journey to the Moon details the history and design of the computer that enabled U.S. astronauts to land on the moon. The book recalls the history of computer technology, both hardware and software, and the applications of digital computing to missile guidance systems and manned spacecraft. The book also offers graphics and photos drawn from the Draper Laboratories' archives that illustrate the technology and related events during the Apollo project. Written for experts as well as lay persons, Journey to the Moon is the first book of its kind and a must for anyone interested…
I am a professor of architecture, urbanism, and landscape at Northeastern University in Boston, as well as a licensed architect and urban designer. I’ve always been fascinated by the ways the design of the world affects our decision-making, health, and opportunities, from the early days of my career designing hospitals to my current work researching and designing for green space equity and considering how we design in the age of pandemics and climate change. I hope these books, as well as my own writing and work, empower people to understand, ask for, and co-design healthier environments wherever they live, work, and play.
Michael Murphy is one of the co-founders of MASS Design Group, who may have seen profiled on60 Minutes or in the Wall Street Journal. This design firm and nonprofit probably does some of the best and broadest work in health and justice-centered design, in projects from the United States to Haiti to Rwanda. I began my career in hospital design, and this book is both a history of innovative healthcare facilities but also provides an introduction to MASS Design’s incredibly innovative work in this sector and is beautifully and richly illustrated to boot.
Architecture of Health is a story about the design and life of hospitals-about how they are born and evolve, about the forces that give them shape, and the shifts that conspire to render them inadequate. Reading architecture through the history of hospitals is a deciphering tool for unlocking the elemental principles of architecture and the intractable laws of human and social conditions that architecture serves in each of our lives.
This book encounters brilliant and visionary designers who were hospital architects but also systems designers, driven by the aim of social change. They faced the contradictions of health care in…
Matan has over a decade of experience at Ecoline and has helped 3500+ clients to renovate their houses. He has earned the title of the best window & door expert of the year for four consecutive years, from 2013 to 2016, helping countless homeowners to create their dream houses. Matan has built a team of 50+ professionals across Canada for Ecoline. His leadership and mentorship have enabled his team to achieve remarkable success, consulting homeowners and helping them choose and install the best products. He looks forward to helping you!
Some of the biggest disasters I've seen in home remodels are when clients pick the wrong architect or don't know how to communicate with them. This book fixes that.
The Forever Home shows you how to pick the right architect, communicate your vision, and avoid common pitfalls. The author is an architect, and it is based on his many years of experience. The book does an excellent job of using visuals to illustrate key points.
The Forever Home provides the foundation to confidently explore what you want, plan your dream home, and find the right professionals to make it a reality.
Renowned architect Kevin Harris will guide you through his proven, step-by-step process to design and build a house that fits you so well it becomes your forever home. No matter where you travel, your forever home is the place you feel complete.
Inside these pages, you’ll learn how to: • Determine when it makes sense to hire an architect • Evaluate and assemble the design team and construction team that’s right for you •…
