In Broken Icarus, author David Hanna tracks the trajectory of aviation leading up to and through the World’s Fair of 1933, as well as the field of flight’s ties to fascism domestic and abroad to present a history that is both riveting and revelatory.
The echoes of current life in Hanna’s account are unavoidable—'Coverage of giant rallies, and an endless barrage of chauvinism, half-truths, and outright lies poured forth from cheap new mass-produced radios,' he writes of Germany under the newly ascendant Hitler—but where our 21st century hangs helplessly between crisis and stasis, here the 1930s are self-consciously dynamic...Broken Icarus is less interested in narrating the story of how the grim events of the decade would unfold than it is in simply winding back the stories we already know, to reach the moment when our historical certainties were only possibilities among other possibilities...The best vantage point to see these converging and diverging contingencies, in Hanna’s reckoning, is the edge of Lake Michigan, at the 1933 World’s Fair—an event caught in its own ambivalent place in history, 'planned in one era of plenty and carried out in another of austerity'...We went to the moon and then we stopped going there, stalled out in the jet age...'Over eighty years on,' Hanna writes, 'we’re now further away from the future envisioned on the shores of Lake Michigan than we were fifty years ago.'
David Hanna’s Broken Icarus: The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, the Golden Age of Aviation, and the Rise of Fascism, approaches Chicago’s strikingly successful Depression-era Century of Progress Exposition from a decidedly less scholarly angle, constructing an accessible, propulsive, multilayered narrative around key aspects of the fair...Broken Icarus often reads like a novel, rich in memorable characters and depictions of colorful contemporary public figures like German airship pioneer Hugo Eckener, Italian Air Force Marshal Italo Balbo, and Swiss scientists/balloonists Auguste, Jules, and Helene Piccard...Through their stories Hanna illustrates how the soaring achievements of aviation’s pivotal era played out against the backdrop of the 1933 fair, and amidst Eckener’s and Balbo’s often fraught relations with the Fascist powers ascendant in their countries at the time...Though no subsequent “World’s Fair Nonfiction Novel” to date has proven as popular as Devil in the White City, several, like the just-launched Broken Icarus, are gripping and rewarding reads.
The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair showcased dazzling technological and scientific advances and 'frightening new political philosophies,' according to this eye-opening account...High school history teacher Hanna draws vivid profiles of aeronautical innovators who attended the fair...Interweaving colorful anecdotes and incisive cultural analysis, this entertaining history strikes a cautionary note about the promise and peril of technology.
