Search results for ""author julia cooke""

At a time when that 1960s notion of air travel as decadent and exceptional is experiencing an unexpected revival, this book ... could be the G&T in a plastic glass you need.' The SpectatorTravel writer Julia Cooke's exhilarating portrait of Pan Am stewardesses in the Mad Men era.Come Fly the World tells the story of the stewardesses who served on the iconic Pan American Airways between 1966 and 1975 - and of the unseen diplomatic role they played on the world stage.Alongside the glamour was real danger, as they flew soldiers to and from Vietnam and staffed Operation Babylift - the dramatic evacuation of 2,000 children during the fall of Saigon. Cooke's storytelling weaves together the true stories of women like Lynne Totten, a science major who decided life in a lab was not for her, to Hazel Bowie, one of the relatively few African American stewardesses of the era, as they embraced the liberation of a jet-set life.In the process, Cooke shows how the sexualized coffee-tea-or-me stereotype was at odds with the importance of what they did, and with the freedom, power and sisterhood they achieved.

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Change looms in Havana, Cuba's capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in cliché, 90 miles from U.S. shores and off-limits to most Americans. Journalist Julia Cooke, who lived there at intervals over a period of five years, discovered a dynamic scene: baby-faced anarchists with Mohawks gelled with laundry soap, whiskey-drinking children of the elite, Santería trainees, pregnant prostitutes, university graduates planning to leave for the first country that will give them a visa. This last generation of Cubans raised under Fidel Castro animate life in a waning era of political stagnation as the rest of the world beckons: waiting out storms at rummy hurricane parties and attending raucous drag cabarets, planning ascendant music careers and black-market business ventures, trying to reconcile the undefined future with the urgent today.Eye-opening and politically prescient, The Other Side of Paradise offers a deep new understanding of a place that has so confounded and intrigued us.

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** Chosen as a May 2021 pick for The Fearless Book Club by Nobel Peace Prize-Winner, Malala Yousafzai **Travel writer Julia Cooke's exhilarating portrait of Pan Am stewardesses in the Mad Men era.Glamour, danger, liberation: in the Jet Age, Pan Am offered young women the world. Come Fly the World tells the story of the stewardesses who served on the iconic Pan American Airways between 1966 and 1975 - and of the unseen diplomatic role they played on the world stage.Alongside the glamour was real danger, as they flew soldiers to and from Vietnam and staffed Operation Babylift - the dramatic evacuation of 2,000 children during the fall of Saigon. Cooke's storytelling weaves together the true stories of women like Lynne Totten, a science major who decided life in a lab was not for her, to Hazel Bowie, one of the relatively few African American stewardesses of the era, as they embraced the liberation of a jet-set life.In the process, Cooke shows how the sexualized coffee-tea-or-me stereotype was at odds with the importance of what they did, and with the freedom, power and sisterhood they achieved.

Read more less