CHARLES KINGSFORD SMITH And Those Magnificent Men
Peter Fitzsimons
HarperCollins, $54.99, hbk
In his introduction Peter Fitzsimons generously acknowledges Ian Mackersey's Smithy, one of the Kiwi author's meticulously-researched biographies of aviation pioneers.
While no book is definitive, Mackersey's work approaches that standard and it is still the book to get if a straight biography of CKS is what you are after.
Perhaps recognising this, Fitzsimons threads the story of the Ocker icon through a general history of aviation, making it as much the story of "those magnificent men" as of Charles Kingsford Smith.
Fitzsimons takes us from the box-kite predecessors of the Wrights through aviation's pioneers, barnstormers, trailblazers and fighting aces to the mid-1930s, when airlines such as Qantas were getting down to the serious business of making flying pay.
It was a transition that Charles Kingsford Smith was temperamentally unsuited to making.
Smithy, a hard-drinking, partying man who had swapped fast motorbikes for faster planes, always remained a bit of an outsider.
Handsome, sociable, lauded by the press, he was awarded prizes, praise and a knighthood, but no permanent berth in either government service or in business, despite giving several airlines a go.
By the time he vanished over the sea in 1935 he was showing signs of physical and emotional burnout.
Had he lived longer would his name still be as revered as it is today?
But as I said, Kingsford Smith's contemporaries make up at least half of this story.
Fitzsimons crams them all into this huge 679-page book - the Wrights, Bleriot, the Red Baron, Lindbergh, aircraft manufacturer Anthony Fokker and a host of others of lesser renown.
It's a crowded gallery, but full of interesting pen portraits of romantics, patriots, heroes and ne'er-do-wells, young men (mainly) who diced with death in their flimsy aircraft.
This discursive approach has pluses and minuses.
On the positive side, the pages turn easily, like Kokoda and his other top-sellers, and it's certainly $55-worth if measured in the lengthy reading time it will fill.
It's crammed with blokish, slightly dated expressions such as "hard yakka", "shoulda worn the brown underpants" and the Shakespearian gem "accompanied by perhaps ten thousand flies that seemed keen on swarming around and crawling all over them as if they were massive dog turds on legs". Strewth!
But is it good history? Not really.
Fitzsimons, a journalist and a former Wallaby, talks about following Gary Smith's advice that biographers should try to get into the heads of the historical figures they write about.
That's what master biographers try to do, with the appropriate cautions, but Fitzsimons is no master and at times I got sick of his numerous interpolations - and of all those hundreds of sentences and paragraphs tailing off in ellipses!
Although he boasts about a thousand end notes, almost all are from secondary sources.
And although he clearly loves aviation and offers a generally reliable explanation of its early days, his reliance on researchers may have led to occasional blunders, such as referring to New Zealand prime minister Gordon Coates by his never-used first name Joseph.
- Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian and reviewer.
