80 Books Like Fate is the Hunter

Originally released in 1967, a new edition of this book was published by Daredevil in 2021. 

Amy Johnson’s story has great personal resonance for me and I was very honoured to write a preface for the book. With less than a hundred hours in her logbook, Amy set out to Australia to break the world record for the fastest time in 1930 and what would become one of the most outstanding solo achievements in history. 

My own flight to Australia in 2015/16 re-tracing Amy’s route was done in homage.  

This is about one of our most brilliant female aviators. 

Largely forgotten today, the Irish Lady Heath, one of our first female Olympians and the first woman in Britain to hold a commercial pilot’s licence, was also the first person to fly solo from Cape Town to England in 1928. 

Her flight was the inspiration for my first expedition up Africa in 2013, about which we made a documentary screened by the BBC, and this book is the moving story of Mary Heath’s exceptional but ultimately tragic life.

I loved reading about these very early pioneers who today are largely forgotten or never known, notably Frank McLean, who met the Wright brothers, and went on to cut an irresistibly romantic, dare-devil figure. 

He became an overnight celebrity when he flew a flimsy seaplane between the towers of Tower Bridge in London in 1912. After the First World War, he was one of the first pilots flying to Africa and down the Nile in what would become one of the early air routes for Imperial Airways in the 1930s.  

Also, Charles Rolls, of Rolls-Royce fame, who was tragically killed in a freak incident at the Bournemouth air display in 1910, the first Brit to be killed in a flying accident. 

This is a lively history of the first 200 years of British women in the sky. 

Given that women were largely blocked by a hostile male establishment from participating in commercial and military aviation for most of the 20th century, this is a riveting account of the unconventional women who defied gravity and everything else to get airborne. Marvellous stuff!

Young Mary had a dream so big that nobody, for the longest time, believed she could achieve it.

She wanted to become an airline pilot. I so admired her courage and determination, against all odds and society’s refusal to accept that women could fly commercial airplanes. This, too, is based on a true story; author, Mary Shipko is the actual little girl who dreamed big, big, big.

I was inexorably drawn into this book, as it fulfilled all my expectations of what a good military aviation techno-thriller should be. It had excellent flying sequences, personal drama, some romance thrown in to add flavor, and rivalry with another skilled pilot.

When I come across such a book, I don’t let go, and I did not let go of this one. It opened an enthralling world into what it takes to teach fighter tactics to already experienced pilots, told from a totally entertaining viewpoint that never descended into dull narrative. I loved the flying sequences, making me believe I was there in the cockpit with the pilot.

During the CIA’s covert war in Laos between 1964 and 1973, the US dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on the country, a planeload every 8 minutes for 9 years and makes Laos, along with Cambodia, which shared a similar fate, is the most bombed country in the world. To this day, countless people, many of them children, are maimed and killed by unexploded ordinance that remains hidden in the country’s soil. Fred Branfman, a young American stationed in Laos in the late 1960s, discovered the bombing and exposed the CIA’s covert campaign of terror.

Branfman not only interviewed more than 2,000 refugees of the bombing but motivated many survivors to record their experiences in essays, poems, and pictures. This book, an excellent antidote and companion piece to Air America, is the result.

Telling the story of the girl who became an international icon when the Associated Press published a photograph of her running from napalm bombing in her village in 1972, Denise Chong’s The Girl in the Picture offers insight into the day-to-day lives of South Vietnamese villagers who simply wanted to survive. Caught between the U.S.-supported South Vietnamese military and the National Liberation Front, villagers often had family members fighting on both sides of the war, not because of divergent ideological beliefs, but because repressive recruitment efforts left young men no choice but to enlist. Through the eyes of Kim Phuc, Denise Chong’s book humanizes life on the ground in a war zone and describes what happened when U.S. troops left the country.

In December 1943, an army test flight took off from Ladd Field near Fairbanks Alaska the instruments malfunctioned and the plane crashed. Read about how the only survivor battled against bitterly cold temperatures, injuries, and starvation. Leon Crane was a city boy from Philadelphia with little wilderness experience. What he did have was an indomitable spirit and an intense desire to live. He soon realized he wouldn’t be rescued so he took it upon himself and walked to safety through some of the harshest terrain on the planet. Well-written and fast-paced, the author's prose inserts the reader into the story. You can feel Cranes hunger pangs and the winds stabbing icy fingers. This book is a tribute to the man's uncrushable will to survive.

If you could only have a single book about American involvement in the air war over Burma during World War II, this would be the one. Ted Young’s history of the Tenth Air Force has it all, from high-level political maneuvering (and there was plenty of it) and seemingly endless reorganizations to in-the-cockpit combat accounts and a generous selection of photos and maps. He describes in detail the constantly shifting priorities and strategies faced by the Tenth Air Force, along with the many innovative tactics and techniques developed by units such as the First Air Commando Group. In addition, Young brings fresh insight into many of the officers who led the efforts in Burma, men such as Clayton L. Bissell. Young describes him as “a capable staff officer with broad administrative experience” who nevertheless was unable to establish a good working relationship with Claire L. Chennault, his more colorful counterpart… show more.