Hot on the heals of his best selling book 'All Kinds of Ships' Seymour Reit has followed up with another tribute to the wonders of human engineering called 'All Kinds of Planes' (okay, I may have been going a little over the top suggesting that 'All Kinds of Ships' was a best seller, but then again it may well have been, though I am not sure if it ever actually made the New York Times best seller list – I wonder if children's books actually make it to that list – I'm sure they have).
Where the previous book was about ships, this book is about planes and if you like planes then you will probably like this book, though he does not mention anything about retractable landing gear in this book (the other children's book on planes did mention retractable landing gear). Like his previous book he starts off by looking at the history of flight (going back to the era where people threw themselves off of towers to see of their 'wings' would work – which inevitably didn't) and then has a look at all of the planes that we have around these days.
Unfortunately this was written in 1978 so it does not mention the Stealth Bomber, the Apache Gunship, or many of the other military planes that are out there. However, he doesn't really mention many military planes at all, except for a few that came out of World War I and World War II. He does suggest that the first plane that broke the speed of sound was a jet plane built by the Americans, though I always thought that it was the Germans who did that during World War II (however it could have been that the Germans built the first jet plane and the Americans were the first to break the speed of sound). ( )