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Mustang Designer: Edgar Schmued and the P-51. By Ray Wagner Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000. ISBN 1-56098-994-7. Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. Glossary. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiii, 253. $19.95.
Mustang Designer focuses on the most celebrated American fighter of them all, the North American P-51 Mustang. Ray Wagner, a world-class aviation writer, offers a new perspective on this well-researched topic by overlaying a biographic treatment of the aircraft's designer onto a history of the American aviation industry and the development of the aircraft. The author uses a wide range of documents and interviews to cover U.S. fighter development between the end of World War I and the late 1950s.
In this relatively brief and readable account, Wagner corrects a number of common...