“Yeager: An Autobiography”, by Chuck Yeager and Leo Janos

448 pages, G. K. Hall & Company, ISBN-13: 978-0816140237

Supposedly, Chuck Yeager has amassed a bad rap, but from his autobiography it’s hard to see why. The retired USAF General, who went from shooting down German jets in WWII to flying faster than sound before anybody else thought it possible, tells it like it is. While that may not engender warm feelings, Yeager was obviously a man even his rivals could trust.

The General writes of his humble Virginian origins. Enlisting in the Army as a mechanic, Yeager moved to the pilot's seat through a program intended to put more non-com's into flight-duty. Yeager displays a true pilot's nostalgia of the days when he writes lovingly of the obsolete P-39's he flew from Oroville (half the P-39's built went to the Red AF under lend/lease). Getting to England by 1943, Yeager upgraded to the legendary P-51 – only to get shot down by a German FW-190. Smuggled into neutral Spain and then repatriated, Yeager returned to his unit and then began shooting down German planes, including the Me-262, the first operational jet fighter. Describing the crude though effective jet, Yeager shows how his mechanic's training and senses made the crucial difference: the early jets, built for high-speed, were vulnerable when approaching their runways for landing. Because existing jet engines responded slowly and unpredictably (with one engine spooling up much faster than the other) Luftwaffe pilots who tried to speed away from threats a low speeds often got sucked into mysterious and uncontrollable rolls. It was thus in that vulnerable state that Yeager hunted the vaunted jets.

After the war, and on the strength of his having been shot down, Yeager became a test pilot at the famed high-desert testing ground of Edwards AFB. Though a fighter pilot, it was again Yeager's mechanic's training that made the difference in his selection to pilot the supersonic X-1. Originally intended for flight by civilian pilots with high-price tags, the X-1 was grabbed in 1947 by the newly formed US Air Force as a high-profile project whose success would set that service apart from the Army from which it had just been separated. Successfully taking the X-1 past the sonic barrier, and avoiding numerous would-be disasters, Yeager excelled as a fighter-pilot. Though rivals with test pilots in other services, it was with civilian pilots that Yeager reveals a true enmity, and for the period NASA pilots in particular. Paid for their work, these pilots were not likely to satisfy the minimal requirements of flight test – exploring and establish the outer boundaries of an airplane's performance (nor were they very good pilots, the General maintains, "proven" by the fatal mid-air collision between the B-70 and a NASA flown F-104 in 1965). Even the best civilian fliers are flawed pilots, exceling simply because of their readiness to test their flawed assumptions, as “Wheaties” Welsh did at the controls of an F-100 prototype with a poorly-designed vertical stabilizer.

Leaving flight-test, Yeager eventually rose to command of a squadron of F-100, a plane revolutionary in that – for its pilots – it inaugurated both missiles and mid-air refueling, and was guaranteed to weed out “weak sisters”. Yeager's adventures include stints commanding units in Europe during the early cold-war days, Vietnam and Pakistan during the 1970s, as well as more flight test. He flew with Jacqueline Cochrane, the rich aviatrix who left the scent of perfume in any plane she flew, chatted with Andrei Tupolev and MiG pilots, and flew MiG-15’s flown to the west by defectors. Through it all, he rarely rises to being judgmental, though he lets history do it for him – like the way the public largely ignored him and other test-pilots while lavishing attention on Mercury pilots whose scientific contributions to flight test were not as great. At the same time, his ire towards the political forces that inevitably stretched their tentacles out at flight test becomes too great to ignore - such as when one lackluster African American pilot becomes the Kennedy Administration's designated astronaut.

Yeager is full of insights into the aviation's golden age as well as the Cold War, yet it remains one man's story, and like the Bell X-1, it’s a story you’re strapped into until the end.

“Chronicle of the Roman Emperors: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers of Imperial Rome”, by Christopher Scarre and Toby A. Wilkinson

240 pages, Thames & Hudson, ISBN-13: 978-0500050774

As a follow-up to The Chronicle of the Roman Republic by Philip Matyszak (see below), Chronicle of the Roman Emperors: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers of Imperial Rome demonstrates that being a Roman Emperor was not necessarily something to envy. Once proclaimed, the Emperor had to delicately balance happiness between the public at large, the senate, and (most importantly) the Praetorian Guard (the Emperor’s bodyguards). There are many examples in this book of Emperors upsetting one of these groups too much and ending up with their heads on pikes. It seems to have been a shaky, difficult office to maintain. Very few Emperors ended their days in peace, and many were brutally murdered (I cringed more than once while reading this book). One big lesson that too many emperors learned the hard way: do not mess with the Praetorian Guard.

This book begins with a brief summary of the city of Rome: how it grew from a monarchy to a Republic and how Octavian secured absolute power from the Senate and became Augustus, marking the beginning of Imperial Rome, which was to be the Western empire's final phase. The book has three sections: The First Emperors (from Augustus to Domitian); The High Point of Empire (Nerva to Alexander Severus); Crisis and Renewal (Maximinus Thrax to Constantine & Licinius); The Last Emperors (Constantine II to Romulus Augustulus). The book also has a continuous timeline that runs through sections of the book for an at-a-glance history.

It's important to note that this is not a history of the Roman Empire; it's a history of the Roman Emperors. Events not directly (or somewhat) tied to an Emperor are not covered. You won't learn about the daily life of a Roman, for example. Still, through the lineage of Emperors a history of the empire in general can be extracted. Who fought who, who tried to overthrow who, descriptions of how Emperor's wives or mothers influenced (and sometimes took over) government, the conversion from traditional pagan Rome to a Christian Rome (it wasn't ALL Constantine), etc. The fall of Rome is not covered in great detail (the final section is the shortest and the detail becomes almost minimal), but the basic idea that the empire was overrun by various peoples emerges.

The pictures, maps, and graphs throughout the book are incredible and complement the text very well. There are maps of conquests, borders of the empire at specific times, coins, maps of the city of Rome, pictures of busts and mosaics of Emperors, architectural reconstructions, pictures of buildings in their current state, etc. Though this book will not make you an expert on the Roman Empire, it provides a great outline from which to learn more. Once it's read, keep it handy for reference. There are many lessons that can be learned from the lives and mistakes of the men (and women) who ruled Rome.

“Chronicle of the Roman Republic: The Rulers of Ancient Rome from Romulus to Augustus”, by Philip Matyszak

240 pages, Thames & Hudson, ISBN-13: 978-0500287637

The history of the Roman republic – an epic tale about how one city in Italy overthrew a monarchy, conquered her neighbors, united Italy, defeated all her rivals in the Mediterranean, and descended into civil war and ultimately monarchy again – presents a formidable challenge to any beginner. The republic itself was a political entity so complex it bewildered foreigners and Romans alike. Its magistrates – a dazzling succession of consuls, suffect consuls, dictators, praetors, aediles, tribunes and special commissioners stretching over nearly 500 years – were too numerous for even the Romans (who were otherwise quite happy to list these sorts of things) to bother recording them all. Finally, the evidence of who these men were and what, when, where, and why they did what they did lies scattered across coins, temple inscriptions, grave markers, bronze tablets, pottery shards, and written histories that as often seek to justify as to inform. To reconstruct this fragmentary and sometimes unreliable evidence into an integrated narrative is far too daunting for even the most intelligent and motivated student, which is why anyone interested in beginning to take up the task should begin with The Chronicle of the Roman Republic by Philip Matyszak.

After a brief introduction covering “Republican Virtues” and “The Rise of Rome”, the Chronicle is organized into four parts: the regal period, the founding of the republic, the wars of expansion, and the era of Caesar. The basic units of each section are devoted to a single Roman leader, including the famous (Scipio, Marius, Sulla, Cicero, Caesar, Brutus), the should-be-famous (Poplicola, Camillus, Marcellus, Livius Drusus, Sertorius), the historically important (Appius Claudius, Flamininus, the Gracchi), the notorious (Flaminius, Galba, Saturninus, Clodius), the legendary (Romulus and Remus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, Ancus Marcius, Servius Tullius), and of course those figures of Roman virtues (Horatius Cocles, Cincinnatus, Regulus, and someone the author calls “Cato the Stoic”) who defined the Republic for many generations of students. Helpfully, each of the 57 figures are placed on a proper timeline, and they are listed with basic genealogical facts, offices held, principal achievements, and manner of death. The sum of all this is like a highly approachable and chronologically arranged version of Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (or, if you prefer, National Geographic meets Broughton's Magistrates of the Roman Republic).

Although the Chronicle is a very good introduction to the men, events, and society of the Roman republic, its biographical approach needlessly omits much regarding the moral and philosophical ideas that motivated these men. With the exception of the influence of Stoicism on Cato the Younger, one seldom gets the impression that the Romans thought very much or very deeply about where they were going, why they were going there, and what fundamentally they were fighting about. Then (as now) ideas mattered: at the root of many social conflicts was a culture clash (e.g., between Hellenism and the agrarian mos maiorum), and for the Romans whose civitas justified (at least in their own eyes) the annihilation of iron age tribes, it would have been nice to have heard a bit from the men who distinguished the Romans from such expansionist tribes as the Huns. The polymath Varro, the philosopher Lucretius, the poet Catullus, and comedian Plautus must have expressed what some of the leading Romans thought of themselves, their world, and their colleagues and their voices must be considered at least as important as the method for donning a toga. With only these two criticisms, however, I couldn't recommend either a better introduction to the Republic or a more enjoyable reference work for even the well-read Romanophile.