Review of "The Inheritor"

Of the Tom Clancy genre, the plot revolves around an Islamist terrorist who sets up a series of attacks on major US energy infrasturcture.  They are well planned and each comes as a total surprise to the US.  The attacks are certainly within the realm of possibility which makes them that much more frightening.  The terrorist is named Aziz Abdul Muhammad and was hand picked by Osama Bin Laden to succeed him, hence the name “The Inheritor.”

 

Intelligence officer David Cain, Air Force Sergeant Emily Thompson and FBI Agent Dave Johnson work as a team to search out Aziz and his operations expert.  Their search takes them far afield but just as they seem on the verge of solving the problem another attack takes place.  

 

There is certainly a great deal of technical information set out in the story which is very interesting but it does not grab the reader as a Clancy story does.  However unlike Tom Clancy’s approach “The Inheritor” does not end well for America.

First flight and how it happened

Most folks are pretty well aware of Orville and Wilbur Wright and the fact that they catapulted the world into flight.  Ohio license plates proclaim “The Birthplace of Aviation” and North Carolina plates proudly declaim “First in Flight.”  Everyone is familiar with the picture of Orville in flight with Wilbur cheering him on.  But who knows that Glenn Curtiss was nipping at their heels and perhaps even flew before they did?  How about Chanute and Otto Lilienthal?  And a number of others who contributed greatly to both the realities of flight and the misplaced theories that hampered progress.

 

The book “Birdmen, the Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies” reveals the massive effort by many people in Europe and the United States to solve the problem of putting men into the sky and making such an effort worthwhile.  Balloons and dirigibles are visited and examined, gliders tested, power plants built and, most importantly, patents sought and issued that affected the search to make men equal to birds.  Today aircraft are built whose wingspans are longer than the first flight by Orville Wright and yet the basic physics remain the same.

 

Here is a book that gathers together the many threads leading to flight and the men who used them to weave a fabric that today envelops the world in a skein of transworld air routes making the world smaller and more accessible with an ease that can only be called remarkable.