This delightful and accessible book is meant for a less academic audience than Dawkins’ usual readers. It focuses on the skill of flying and “all the different ways of defying gravity” that have been developed by humans over the centuries in their attempts to achieve what birds do so effortlessly. In addition, he writes, it includes “wandering flights of thought and ideas which take off from thinking about flight itself.”

Richard Dawkins is a well-known best-selling biologist, evolutionary theorist, and somewhat militant atheist. His interests and expertise lie principally in the world of animate beings.

Dawkins being Dawkins, he emphasizes the monumental difference between the process of design and the process of evolution. To Dawkins (and pretty much all other serious biologists), evolution is a process driven by random events and not guided by any conscious designer.

He starts by pointing out evidence of human fascination with flight, beginning with the Greek myth of Daedalus and his son Icarus, who tried to escape from Crete by fashioning wings of feathers and wax. Icarus flew too close to the sun causing the wax holding the wings together to melt, and he crashed into the sea, leaving us with a wonderful metaphorical story about flying too close to the sun. Dawkins also invokes the story of Pegasus, the flying horse; the magic carpet of The Arabian Nights; flying broomsticks; and flying saucers, inter alia.. But this book, he writes, will not stray from scientific fact, while still delineating the miraculous “ways in which gravity can be tamed, though not literally escaped.”

The author includes numerous tidbits about curious evolutionary developments. For example, although most insects have four wings, flies have only two — “the second pair of wings evolved to become sense organs called halteres, “little sticks with a knob on the end,” which act like tiny gyroscopes to help with steering and stability. The largest animal ever to fly was probably Quetzalcoatlus (part of a group most people know as pterodactlys), a reptile with a long neck and a wing span of 10 to 11 meters, comparable to a Piper Cub aircraft.

How did an animal with such a long neck support its huge head in order to fly? He tells us about recent research into its aerodynamics. Similarly, he informs us how seabirds fly in both air and underwater, and about the very interesting way insects achieve their wingbeat frequencies, generating, for example, the “infuriating noise you hear when a mosquito is about to bite you….”

He also explores weightlessness, a method of defying gravity only used by humans, common to space travel. How does it work? What does it feel like? How is it related to the amazing skill of some non-humans, like the flea, which has an ability to leap, in relation to its body size, roughly equivalent to the distance of a human jumping over the Eiffel Tower?

Evaluation: This is a well-written book that taps into both the principles of flight (by animals and machines) and at least as much about the theory of evolution and its application to the development of the ability to fly possessed by different kinds of animals. It is not a deep or detailed analysis of aerodynamics, but a pleasant read about some common as well as unusual flying animals and machines.

Besides the content, what is remarkable about this book is that it is a visual treat in addition to instructive. Illustrations by Slovakian artist Jana Lenzová are pretty enough to make the book a decent “coffee table” volume.

(JAB) ( )