1962; Putnam & Company publishers, London; hardbound; very good condition of book, boards and spine; dust jacket good with minor edge wear.
 
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While most Latin Americans and almost any Brazilian will emphatically declare that Alberto Santos-Dumont rather than the Wright Brothers was first to fly, RAF officer Wykeham’s book is the first description of this aeronautical pioneer’s work to appear in an English-language book since the 1904 translation of a brief autobiography.
 
Santos-Dumont is studied as a personality as well as an aviator. The author acknowledges advice from several authorities on his subject’s mental make-up, a condition aptly capsulized in the sub-title of the book. Santos-Dumont’s suicide, which actually stopped fighting briefly in the 1932 uprising against Vargas, was caused by his emotional distress over the warfare uses of “his invention,” as well as by an increasingly severe medical state, diagnosed by the author and his medical authorities as sclerosis. The book is original in its analyses along these significant lines.