Books I'm Reading: The Great Dirigibles: Their Triumphs and Disasters

A Dover publication of a text originally published in 1957, I picked this up somewhere long ago and finally read it over a recent weekend. John Toland's The Great Dirigibles: Their Triumphs and Disasters is not very well titled. It would be better called The Great Dirigibles: One Disaster after Another, as the author spends little time talking about the successful flights of these once-great airships. The book is mostly a telling of how some of the most famous of them met their ends—in great detail, based on eyewitness accounts. If nothing else, this book makes it clear just how fragile and dangerous dirigibles (especially hydrogen-filled dirigibles) were.