Black and White Airmen: Their True History
by John Fleischman
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Book Summary Information
Author: John FleischmanEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-06-18
ISBN: 0618562974
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children
Book Reviews of Black and White Airmen: Their True History
Book Review: Making a sound like thunder
Summary: 5 Stars
Fun Fact: If you want to get the attention of a class of sixth graders, tell `em about a book where a guy blew a metal rod through the top of his skull and lived. That'll wake the little buggers up! Yes, when it comes
to booktalking a work of non-fiction to kids, I've relied on John Fleischman and his book, Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science for years. Insofar as I could ever tell, this was Fleischman's one and only contribution to the world of children's literature, and it was a doozy. Science is rarely so simultaneously gory and well-written. I suppose I had the feeling that maybe Fleischman was some kind of one hit wonder. I mean, he spends most of his time writing scientific articles for journals like Muse and Harvard Health Letter. He also writes for Air & Space Smithsonian, which, had I but known, would have made his latest book a little less left-fieldish for me. "Black and White Airmen: Their True History" is exactly what you want out of your historical non-fiction for kids. It strikes just the right balance of personal stories, historical clarifications, and exciting air battles.
They grew up in the same town, were in the same third grade class, and fought practically side-by-side in the same air battles, but John Leahr and Herb Heilbrun didn't know one another until the year 1997. At that time, Herb read in the paper that the mayor of Cincinnati would be presenting a public award to some Tuskegee pilots not too far away. So Herb crashed the reception. He wanted to thank the guys who'd covered his tail during multiple escort missions and in doing so he met John. Herb and John became fast friends, finding that they had more in common than they had ever expected. Through their eyes, Fleischman tells the story of Fifteenth Air Force and the Tuskegee airmen. He draws attention to racial lines and divides at that time then brings you face-to-face with what it meant to fly an airplane during the Great War. The author is adept at making this a very personal story at one moment and a look at history the next without ever straining his narrative or cutting too quickly. It makes for a startlingly good story.
For kids, the notion that your grandparents and great-grandparents were ever children can be baffling. Baffling and more than a little inconceivable. You might concede that they were capable of fighting in a massive war more than 60 years ago, but that they were ever kids running about reading comic books? Go pull the other one. So some of the best parts of this book come when you see contemporary John and Herb going to classrooms and showing classes a picture of the two of them in third grade. That was part of what I really liked about this title. You see enough of our two heroes as kids to give them some depth and history, but not so much that you get bored waiting for the action to start.
Now a book of this sort becomes a very delicate balancing act early in the game. On the one hand, Fleischman must have known how important it was to give history and context to racism in America during the Second World War. Tying this into John's story is easy enough, considering some of the challenges he faced. But when you write a book about a black pilot and white pilot, the temptation is going to be to sort of ignore the white pilot's tale in favor of the more exciting black pilot's narrative. Fleischman does a good job of evening out the storyline without padding it out or filling it with unnecessary information. Even as you find yourself on Herb's side, you can't help but notice how unfair John's life was in comparison. A kid's temptation would be to blame Herb for his race's stupidities, but Fleischman never allows that to happen. In a way, this book felt like a slightly more fleshed out version of Freedom Riders: John Lewis and Jim Zwerg on the Front Lines of the Civil Rights Movement, which paired the stories of a black and a white civil rights activist and their shared experiences in participating in the 1961 Freedom Rides. Yet I found this title superior in terms of showing the ties between the lead characters while really pulling you into their story. Both are great books, but this one felt a little slicker in the delivery.
The portions dealing with racism in America are just great. There are sentences like, "the color line in Cincinnati was invisible in law but razor sharp in daily life." And darned if the author doesn't actually make me interested in airplane and air battles. Admittedly my own grandfather was a pilot in WWII, but I'd never thought to research what he would have gone through in the air. Fleischman includes all sorts of interesting mentions. Planes needed an overhaul if they had five hundred hours "on the clock" (i.e. in the air). You may not think much of that fact when you first hear about it, but when Herb is later given a plane with 521 hours on it, you know he's in for trouble. And exciting? You betcha. There's one moment where Herb tears every single muscle in his upper back just by wrestling his B-17 into formation and then he has to continue to fly it alone through a five-hour mission because his co-pilot was paralyzed by fear and almost killed the entire crew... whew!
A co-worker of mine pointed out that for some kids, certain sections are going to grab their attention more than others. There are definitely child readers out there for whom air battles and combat via planes is going to be the primary focus of their interest with this book. Other kids will want to know about the Tuskegee airmen, and maybe only look at the book from that perspective. Still others might need to find WWII biographies, and this title certainly has two. I like to think that it's the personal stories that will allow some kids to read this book cover to cover, growing close to the real life characters. When Herb finds out that his best friend during the war that he thought was dead turns out, fifty years later, to be alive and living in Minnesota, THAT is amazing and makes for a great read.
Abundant photographs pepper the pages of this book, keeping the eye moving without ever distracting. Fleischman has eschewed the use of pullout boxes or entire pages dedicated to a related topic that pull away from the narrative. This is a smart choice on his part. And while I rarely see authors of non-fiction children's titles justify their lack of source notes, Fleischman is careful to point out that, "I leave source notes to scholars who write about History." Aside from the first-person interviews Fleischman conducted to get much of his information, there is also a nice list of Resources for kids under topics like "For the Tuskegees", "For the air war in general", "For the air war at the movies", etc. An Index is included in the back.
One of the very first things Fleischman says of this true story is, "We have all sorts of `true' stories today that aren't entirely true... True books like this one are usually called `nonfiction,' which is a funny word. All it guarantees is that this book is `not fiction,' that is, that I didn't make it up entirely. Imagine if food were labeled that way; imagine that the ingredients listed on an ice cream wrapper said only `Not stones.'". Be that as it may be, I'll take Fleischman's "not stones" over that of his contemporaries any day of the week. "Black and White Airmen" mixes different kinds of history topics alongside personal recollections with flair. The result is a book I'll be handing to any kid doing a WWII assignment or just wanting to know more about some of the great men who served so long ago.
Summary of Black and White Airmen: Their True History
Here is the true history of a friendship that almost wasn?t.
John Leahr and Herb Heilbrun grew up in the same neighborhood and were in the same third grade class together. They were classmates—not friends—because Herb was white and John was black.
John and Herb were twenty-one when the United States entered WWII. Herb became an Army Air Forces B-17 bomber pilot. John flew P-51 fighters. Both were thrown into the brutal high-altitude bomber war against Nazi Germany, though they never met because the army was rigidly segregated—only in the air were black and white American fliers allowed to mix.
Both came safely home but it took Herb and John another fifty years to meet again and discover that their lives had run almost side by side through war and peace. Old friends at last, Herb and John launched a mission to tell young people why race once made all the difference and why it shouldn?t anymore.
John Leahr and Herb Heilbrun grew up in the same neighborhood and were in the same third grade class together. They were classmates—not friends—because Herb was white and John was black.
John and Herb were twenty-one when the United States entered WWII. Herb became an Army Air Forces B-17 bomber pilot. John flew P-51 fighters. Both were thrown into the brutal high-altitude bomber war against Nazi Germany, though they never met because the army was rigidly segregated—only in the air were black and white American fliers allowed to mix.
Both came safely home but it took Herb and John another fifty years to meet again and discover that their lives had run almost side by side through war and peace. Old friends at last, Herb and John launched a mission to tell young people why race once made all the difference and why it shouldn?t anymore.
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