The Wild Blue Yonder is a collection that brings together writing that puts into words the exhilarating, alarming, and sometimes sublimely mystical sensation of flight. The story of aviation is almost exactly concurrent with the history of the 20th century. The Wild Blue Yonder contains some of the very best writing about flight, from the lonely adventure of pioneers like Beryl Markham and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, to the horror of aerial bombardment during the Spanish Civil War and the Vietnam War, from Chuck Yeager's breaking of the sound barrier to the musings of such writers as Tom Wolfe, Julian Barnes, Nicholson Baker and V. S. Naipaul.