Review: Yeager: An Autobiography

Yeager: An Autobiography by Chuck Yeager
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this side-by-side with Fighter Pilot: The Memoirs of Legendary Ace Robin Olds: two books about fighter pilots that went from before the jet age to become WW II aces, military airmen in Vietnam and help usher in the space age. Both had careers that skipped over direct involvement in Korea with Yeager making a Korean Conflict cameo as one of the first American pilots to fly a MiG-15, after its pilot, No Kum-sok, defected to South Korea. Of course, Yeager has a chief pioneering accomplishment for breaking the sound barrier and this goes into the technical and hysterical obstacles. I am a bit confused, by then, didn't we have rockets and ballistic object that went supersonic? Maybe not. Life out in the desert testing range in isolation and effective poverty is told with an engaging technique of "other voices" as used in American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. Not only Yeager's wife, but pilots and others have contributed their recollections and points of view of the maverick and courageous airman. Both Yeager and Olds recall the incident of Jack Broughton and his career-ending strafing of a Soviet ship in Haiphong Harbor (the "Turkestan incident"). Yeager recalls toeing a line on military discipline in the court-martial but stating it came out in court complete proof the American flyers were first fired on from the ship. This incident, and others, were for both pilots a clear beginning of disenchantment with careers in the American military.

View all my reviews