170 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE planes with folding, fabric-covered wings reinforced by bamboo ribs radiating from a king post on each side and braced with numerous wires. Pilcher, however, btted his later gliders with wheeled under carriages, which helped absorb the shock of landing and eased the task of moving the machines about on the ground. By 1898, Pilcher had built and flown an improved glider, named the Hawk, and he was developing designs for a triplane powered by a small two-cylinder engine. Throughout, he had the encouragement and assistance of his sister Ella. Pilcher persisted in his conviction that aerodynamic control surfaces were unnecessary: this, of course, greatly circumscribed his work and made it unlikely that he could have succeeded with a larger powered machine. However, he never had to face that reality, for the tail of the Hawk collapsed in midair during a routine flight at Stanford Hall in 1899. Pilcher died a few days later from the injuries sustained in the crash. Another Icarus is likely to be considered the definitive biography of Percy Pilcher. Jarrett has pieced together Pilcher’s story despite the dearth of primary sources—Pilcher was a “reluctant correspondent” (p. ix) and did not leave behind a body of letters or other unpublished materials. Further, Jarrett provides a balanced assessment of Pilcher’s accomplishments, stressing that he “made no revolutionary scientific or technical contributions to the advancement ofaeronautics” (p. 147). Yet Pilcher does deserve such extended treatment, because he was, as Jarrett writes, “the first man in Britain to design, construct, and make successful flights in heavier-than-air aircraft” (p. 148). I wish, however, that Jarrett had been more explicit about Pilcher’s place within Crouch’s technological “community.” Although Pilcher’s connections with Maxim and Chanute receive considerable attention, it might have been in structive had Jarrett delved more deeply into the context of Pilcher’s empirical approach to heavier-than-air flight. It was, after all, the methodology of the engineer and not that of the scientist that even tually led to the Wrights’ success. Jarrett’s book nevertheless is a wor thy addition to the growing literature on the early history of flight. William F. Trimble Dr. Trimble is assistant professor of history at Auburn University. With W. David Lewis, he is the author of The Airway to Everywhere: A History of All American Aviation, 1937—1953, published in 1988 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. History of Rocketry and Astronautics. Edited by R. Cargill Hall. 2 vols. San Diego, Calif.: Univelt for the American Astronautical Society, 1986. Pp. xii + 238/489; illustrations, notes, indexes. $100.00 (cloth); $80.00 (paper) the set. In aerospace history, as in most everything else, there is a critical need for international understanding. Too many authors still tell their TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 171 stories without sufficient consideration of international contributions and their worldwide context and significance. Too many museums trumpet national achievements as if other national experiences have been irrelevant to human progress into air and space. Too many scholars have never attended a symposium or conference outside their own borders. For that reason and others, too many American aero space historians cannot name even one of their Soviet or Western European counterparts. One American aerospace historian who is familiar with the inter national community of aerospace historians is R. Cargill Hall, histo rian at the United States Air Force Historical Research Center at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama and editor of this welcome an thology published by the American Astronautical Society. In a twopart volume containing thirty-nine essays, fourteen of his authors are American; the other twenty-five are: Soviet (twelve), Spanish (three), Polish, Austrian, West German, Swiss (two each), Swedish, and Hun garian. The result is a smorgasbord that whets the appetite for more foreign offerings in aerospace history. Unfortunately, the food for thought here has been sitting out on the table for some time. The International Academy of Astronautics (IAS) has sponsored a symposium on the history of aeronautics at the annual congress of the International Astronautical Federation since 1967, with the idea of publishing proceedings in English and Russian. The essays in...