Aviation books: historical and fiction

[Sternjaeger II]

Originally Posted by 5./JG27.Farber

Dont get Blonde Knight of Germany. The first 2 chapters are the authors knoshing each other off about how well they know Erich Hartmann... The book is repetative and I believe the co-authors (it took two of them to write one book) wrote the book in seperate buildings let alone seperate rooms! Its like they both wrote the book and then used the best chapters from each... They have to recap when ever they reiterate an incident in his life. Its like an American program where they recap after the break... Its annoying!

Seriously, its bad. The bits in it by Hartmann (which are miniscule) are golden but the rest of it besides some skeches and pictures is just pulp... However around the last 40% of the book about his captivity in Soviet Russia for 11 years is worth reading and is proberbly the least known part of Hartmann...

I think there is one whole chapter in about a Russian Ace where the book just goes of on a tangent.

You could proberbly pick up a second hand (nearly new) one for less than a tenner and see for yourself.

dude I dunno what you expect from a pilot's bio... it's still a great read, even by today's standards, because it covers the whole career of the pilot as a whole. What were you expecting "aerial victory report x 352"? It's a very well written book with a lot of interesting insights on Hartmann the pilot and the man.
It might not have reached your expectations (whichever they are), but to say it's seriously bad is ludicrous to say the least