Stewardess: Come Fly with Me! [ハードカバー]

A very bland pictorial scrapbook of those jet-set ladies from the past. It could and should have looked much better than this haphazard collection of period company PR photos from the last few decades. There is no contents page, no captions to the photos or even page numbers to give a buyer any sense that this is any more than a quickie production which I expect will hit the mark-down section of most bookstores faster than the publisher's expected.

Despite this there are a few pages that caught my interest. Near the back of the book there are twenty or so of those upright timetables that you could pick up from travel shops years ago. Each has a smilling (naturally) stewardess, a company logo and parts of a jet on the cover.

Another reviewer has mentioned Come Fly With Us!: A Global History of the Airline Hostess which covers exactly the same subject and predictably has the same sort of soft focus posed company photos but at least it has a lot more editorial flair and an imaginative design (even though its published by Collectors Press). Stewardesses by the nature of their job are likely to be seen in most books about airlines and these two offer an interesting pictorial overview of flying: Airline Design (Designpockets) and Airline: Identity, Design and Culture. I prefer this last book to the others mentioned.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

Chronicle Books has produced many exciting, well-researched, expertly written and graphically enticing books exploring seemingly every facet of American popular culture. It's also served up some slapdash, cut-and-paste jobs that needed a little more editorial effort. This stewardess tome definitely falls in the latter category. It's a scrapbook mess of a book and a big disappointment. Even the short introduction, though fairly informative and well-written, doesn't let us know exactly when the "golden age" of flight occurred. 1950s? 1960s? Going by the book's cover and the retro title, I anticipated a narrowly focused book on the era of the swinging stewardess, roughly 15 years from 1960 to 1975. This was the golden age of flight and the golden age of the stewardess. Airlines then only hired young, female, unmarried, childless, great-looking stews and outfitted them in uniforms ranging from smart Pucci designs (Braniff) to street-corner hooker getups (Pacific Southwest Airlines). Popular culture in those years was wild about the stewardess. The sexy stew was the ultimate object of desire. Books, movies, magazines, TV shows, postcards, board games, cocktail glasses, boarding passes, you-name-it, fired up the male libido (and cash registers) with provocative images and tall tales. No bachelor's little black book was complete with the name of at least one Rachel or Trudi or Bambi who flew the friendly skies. There was an entire publishing boom around Donald Bain's ghost-written "Coffee, Tea or Me" paperbacks. Drive-in movies were replete with gorgeous stews doing very adult things. This book does touch on some material of this crazy era--advertisements, grainy snapshots, brochures--but it's pretty scant and mixed together with other stewardess ephemera from dowdier times. The entire book is non-annotated, so you don't know exactly what you're looking at or why. For example, facing pages will show a stewardess class from the 1980s and a class from the 1950s without a single caption or even letting you know what airline. Even the credit page in the back is not useful; it credits the cover from USAirways without letting you know it's actually two PSA stewardesses from the early '70s before the USAirways merger. A much better book came out a few years ago called "Come Fly With Us." Though apparently out-of-print, it's worth tracking down if you're really interested in flight attendant history. The big pop-culture book about the much-loved sexy stewardess, though, is still to be written.

I purchased this book as reference material for graphic illustrations. I was warned by previous reviews to take caution in its purchase, but didn't pay attention. The idea of the book was good, but it took me nowhere. The book could have been produced on a larger format,i.e., larger photos. There was very little body, pardon the pun,to describe the history of this profession. The photos had little or no drescriptions positioned near them. The era of the airline stewardess intrigued me while growing up, and it reminded me of a time when flying was an experience and not a security risk. This book was close, but just missed the runway.