The four MacDonalds, soon increased to five by marriage and depleted by air tragedy, are the heroes of ["Blaze of Noon"] Mr. Gann tells their story smoothly and well, though its tone is just a shade too slick to let you think of the author as a flyer first and a professional scribe second…. Full of daring duels with cumulo-nimbus, complete with that inevitable tense huddle around the airport radio, sweating the comrade aloft down through the blizzard, "Blaze of Noon" is prime dressed Hollywood meat, right down to and including a bathtub scene….

Mr. Gann's book is a competent novelization of the [birth of the airlines] … and a thoroughly readable story of men who "lived with valor as with a mistress." It will serve, for the time, as a monument to the heroic air era midway between the Wrights's flying machine and the B-29. Some day it...