Olga Tokarczuk writes in her most celebrated novel Flights: “Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness-these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized. Barbarians don't travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.” True to her message, many of us might not have realized how our daily lives are now shaped by the rise of the modern way of travelling: by plane. About a century ago, it was unthinkable how hyperconnected our world could be and how we could be in two vastly different places of the globe in only a matter of hours. In the funniest anecdote, the flight from Irkutsk to Moscow has a duration of 5 hours. It takes off at 8 am and arrives at exactly the same time in Moscow, at eight o’clock the same day since the time differences between the two cities are 5 hours. But the rise of international travel began with a single American airline: Pan Am Airways.

The post-war United States gave stability to its citizens. Europe was just recovering from the atrocities of the Second World War, but the US was mostly unharmed with the war taking place in Europe. The disposable incomes gave people the chance to spend their money outside of the United States. The most preferred method was surely by flying. As an airline which focused on international routes, Pan Am could be said as arriving at the right time and the right place to the hyper-connectivity starting in the early 1960s with routes spanning from New York to Europe to Africa to Asia to Hawaii and finally back to Los Angeles. The different routes just took it westward from Los Angeles through similar hubs with the end in New York. As in every modern flight these days, the international flights operated by Pan Am were crewed by stewardesses, whose unique stories are being told in this book.

Upon reading the word Pan Am, the first thing that comes to my mind was the story of how Frank W. Abagnale faked his way of being an impostor Pan Am pilot whose crime went unrecognized for several years. The film Catch Me If You Can, starred by DiCaprio in his prime, provides a wonderful depiction to an era that is both familiar and foreign to my generation. It is hardly thinkable in the present moment that someone could stay as an impostor as a pilot for several years, what with the compulsory security process required for flight crews. But in some other ways, it also gives us some scenes of what we have been missing since the rise of international travels. Julia Cooke, who happens to be the daughter of one of Pan Am formers executive provides us in this story partly history, partly journalism, and partly cultural analysis of the role of stewardesses in improving the state of international flights in the past few decades.

The author presents us with a character like Lynne who has just earned her biology degree and was up for some challenges. There’s a whole world out there, she thought, and I need to get involved, was what she thought at that time. There are some other characters who got introduced such as Hazel Bowie who was the first African American stewardess who worked for Pan Am, or Tori who happened to be a Norwegian that ended up choosing to steward with Pan Am as a result of not fulfilling the requirement to join the Norwegian Foreign Service Academy at that time due to gender discrimination to foreign women. They faced similar epiphany, their job as stewardesses turned out to be liberating their status as women in the 1960s with the privileges that they received as flight crews such as discounted flight tickets for their families and countless hours of layovers in some most grandiose hotels around the globe.

Yet their stories contain not only joyful memories, as the 1960s and the 1970s are the decades of the peak for American involvement in the war effort in Vietnam. I happened to be reading another book about the war in Vietnam around this time, and the efforts put by Pan Am and their crews during the war might be something unrecognized through these years with countless chartered flights to transport American troops and finally ended with Operation Babylift which transferred more than 2,000 Vietnamese orphans to the US for adoption. While this book is too focused on Pan Am and their roles in shaping post-war international aviation industry, it will surely be something of interest for people who travel a lot and those who could not travel due to the current pandemic situation which has been affecting us globally.

Pan Am Airway has become an integral part to the American mythos, and Cooke provides readers with a fascinating inside look at the company and the women who would make it what it was. Told in multiple perspectives, Come Fly the World unravels some of the cloud of mysticism around a renowned airline company, a great read for female empowerment and history buffs alike.

Huge thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book! Overall, I enjoyed this story and getting to read about the role that Pan Am flight attendants contributed during the Vietnam War (especially Operation Babylift). I anticipated this book being filled with the glitz and glamour as the first few chapters portrayed while introducing several characters into the story and how they came to be Pan Am flight attendants. However, I liked getting to learn more than the typical life of a Pan Am flight attendant by Cooke detailing the specific cast of characters ( like Tori, Lynne and Karen) who contributed to history. It is a multi-layered book that is sure to appeal to a wide array of readers!

***thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book***

Wow! I was drawn to this book because of the cover and the title. I'm a 15-year flight attendant and have always loved to read stories of the days when the job was glamorous. I thought it would be a fun read for these horrible times, especially with all the mask policing I'm doing at work these days. I had absolutely no idea what I was in for with this book.

I am floored by how much education I've gained from this book. I had no idea how instrumental Pan Am was in the Vietnam war and what these women went through when they put on their uniforms and went to work. From RR flights carrying soldiers out of warzones to tropical islands in the South Pacific to Operation Babylift flights at the end of the war, these incredible women were doing what they knew how to do best, put on a brave face and smile through it all.

I loved the way the author told these heroic stories and painted their pictures as women fighting for a place in the world while they're also navigating war on foreign land, as well as the fight for female equality in the US. I have so much respect for the lives that these women lived and the way they carried themselves through their experiences.

My experiences as a flight attendant for a domestic, low-budget carrier are nothing like the experiences of these stewardesses of the jet age, but there is a thread of commonality in their love of their job and the lifestyle that it provided that made my heart swell. It reminded me of what has made me stick around for so long, which if I'm completely honest, has been difficult to remember as of late.

Here are a few quotes that stood out:

She wanted to know about people - how they lived, who they were, something beyond what a taxi driver with passable English could tell her. Passengers offered Lynne the best shot at constructing a scaffolding of knowledge around which her experiences on the ground could grow.

Every plane was a vessel filled with people and their stories.

Lynne taught them everything she knows about travel: how to move as a woman through the world with curiosity and confidence and deference for local perspectives and customers and how, whether she is near or far from home, that stance erases fear. "My mother," her elder girl says, "has no fear of the other."


Loved it!

Huge thank you to HMH and netgally for this ARC - which I received for free on exchange for my honest review.

I loved this book, until the last 20%, where it started to drag. But overall it was increasing my interesting to read about the lives of women during the early decades of flight. It wasn’t just about flight attendants, it was about how much women’s rights laws and social ideas about women have changed, and how much we still have to do. It also looks at the Vietnam war, which was a travesty, but it explores the topic in ways I didn’t k is about (like airlifting orphans).

I think the book could use a bit mire editing to tighten it up. Some of the women’s stories feel thrown in or unfinished. Especially Hazel, which is disappointing as she is very interesting.

Would recommend. Might use excerpts with my students.

Glamour, danger, liberation: in a Mad Men–era of commercial flight, Pan Am World Airways attracted the kind of young woman who wanted out, and wanted up

It was fascinating reading about the stewardess of Pam Am. I was always fascinated by the story of the airline that was everything and its demise. This book was even more special because it takes about the stewardess and their journey against the history of the world at the time.
Really nice and well written.

This had a little bit of everything in it. From history of the aircraft and companies to war and what aircraft potentially lifted from one end of the world to the other. It was interesting for someone not too familiar with the aircraft industry.

Wasn't aware of how focused this book would be about Pan AM and the Vietnam war. Was an enjoyable book, but it was a bit of false advertising.

This is a fascinating history of the rise of the jet age and the development of the stewardess profession. Far from the salacious image often assigned to the role, these women were highly educated, independent individuals who made significant contributions. Will definitely recommend.

I just finished reading a delightful book entitled "Come Fly the World: The Jet Age Story of the Women of Pan Am," by Julia Cooke. I wish to extend my gratitude to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for making an electronic ARC available to me for review. Many of you are aware that there has been a great deal of interest in Pan American Airlines per se as well as the women who made careers as stewardesses during the 50's, 60' and 70's. Perspectives and narrative approaches have varied widely, and I have read a number of these. None were more fascinating and nuanced than this text. Looking at Pan Am's role in the lives of the young women who served as stewardesses (flight attendants in modern parlance) through the eyes and experiences of a number of the women who actually served in Pan Am at that time and with a sensitivity to the cultural context of those transformatory decades following World War II and ending with the trauma of the fall of Saigon makes for an interesting book indeed. Without overlooking Pan Am's obvious sexism and biases in hiring policies and terms of employment, the author, carefully situating this within the cultural norms of the time, focuses on the transformations that international travel with relatively competitive salary structures afforded to those adventurous souls who were fortunate enough to take advantage of what was on offer. Travel, money, access to a lifestyle largely denied to young women of their time, all of these things characterized Pan Am for these young women. At the same time, many of them found it to be, in the lexicon of the time, a consciousness raising exercise through their encounters with the beginnings of international terrorism and the omnipresent Vietnam War. I was, literally and unexpectedly, reduced to tears as the role of the young women in assisting in evacuating orphans and other refugees from the South Vietnamese collapse and the precipitate withdrawal of U.S. officials and dependents played out before me, the tragedy of it all heightened by the sensitivities of the young women who bore witness. I enjoyed this book enormously, not least for its nuanced and balanced presentation of a group of young women who, despite the way they and their employer are frequently caricatured in popular literature, were in many ways, at the forefront of what we now call the Women's Liberation Movement. They deserve acknowledgment from those who followed down the well worn paths they first trod.

Come Fly the World is poorly described. It is being sold as book about Pan Am stewardesses, but in reality is about the role of Pan Am during the Vietnam War. That topic is very interesting, and I enjoyed learning about the role of commercial airlines in the war effort. Unfortunately, that is not what the book promised, and not what I wanted to actual read about.

Thank you to Net Galley for the ARC for an honest review.

Come Fly the World follows the lives and careers of Pan Am flight attendants during their career with the famous airline. The book presents intersecting stories of women detailing what brought them to Pan Am, their extraordinary qualifications as flight attendants, and the adventures brought to them.

I enjoyed this book far more than I anticipated! From the cover I expected more of a fictional or light read, I had no idea I was signing up to learn far more than I expected to about the talents and bravery of the flight attendants of this era. This book taught me a lot, and I know the awesome legacy of these flight attendants making their way in their careers as women is a story everyone would love to read.

Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Come Fly the World is a meticulously researched and still highly personal account of the jet age, when international travel began its ascent after World War II.

It is the story primarily of Pan Am and its stewardesses (only later known as flight attendants), and also therefore a story of early feminism and the Vietnam War.

I learned a great deal and came to truly admire the courage and adventurous spirits of the women Julia Cooke interviewed for this book, not to mention how they paved the way for solo women travelers and equal employment opportunity legislation.

Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the review copy.

This book was not what I expected. While I did enjoy quite a bit of the history of Pan Am and the stewardesses in the 60's and 70's I felt the author was really giving a history lesson about the Vietnam war. I understand that many of the women who signed up to be stewardesses were doing so because they felt that it was something they could do to help the soldiers, but a thorough history lesson was not necessary. The stories about the real women who flew, especially Tori, Lynne and Karen who flew on Operation Babylift, were amazing and incredibly facinating. I'd pay to listen to those women talk! So in the end I give this book 3 stars.
Thank you to Netgalley for the eARC!

"Come Fly the World" is a fascinating look at the world of flight attendants in a more glamorous age, although that age clearly was more challenging on a number of levels. Women took on the role of flight attendant ("stewardess" back then) for many reasons, among them the freedom to travel and see the world, personal independence, and the opportunity for freedom that wasn't easily found for women decades ago. This is an era, not so long ago, when the career options for women were limited. Female employees of the State Department, looking to build careers in diplomatic service, had to retire when they got married.

Throughout these decades, as the airline industry grew in a post-World War II world, the tough, smart women who worked for the airlines were witness to a changing world, including some of its glories and its horrors, like their participation in flights carrying soldiers to and from the Vietnam War, and the airlifts to save orphaned children as US involvement drew to a close.

Focusing primarily on Pan Am and the culture that grew with this leading international airline--with discussions of the roles of other airlines, as well--"Come Fly the World" immerses the reader in the experience airlines, particularly Pan Am, looked to create for travelers in a very different era from today's travel experience. The onboard announcements were part of the "showmanship," as the book quotes a publication of the day pointing out. "Our passengers are starting out on an adventure and we are helping them to get the feel of it immediately." Of course, this also was an era when there was no question about the image the airlines wanted to project in their stewardesses. Applying lipstick the right way, grooming lessons, and so on, all were part of the job. This continued and only took on a cruder tone in the "fly me" era of sexually-charged airline advertising.

While the exploitive nature of this airline-to-employee relationship is dubious, any number of these ladies also enjoyed the sexual and romantic freedom their profession offered. Happily, this book doesn't shy away from exploring this aspect of their careers, either. It's certainly not something that should bring shame. Rather, the freedom to live life as they saw fit is a great thing, and these pioneers of the professional world also helped usher in greater freedom for women in general. This is summed up well with the sharing of Helen Gurley Brown's favorite saying, "Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere."

For those of us who wish we'd been able to experience the jet age and its classier approach to travel, being reminded of the days when airlines turned out guide books with tips on how to get the most out of visiting one city or another, "Come Fly the World" is a slice of happy time travel. Hitting an excellent balance between the glory of that era and the realities and challenges of life for those who lived it, the author does an excellent job of letting us experience life from the perspective of some of those who were on the front lines of the age.

From the first American flights to Moscow and the stewardesses' watching out for KGB surveillance to experiencing Beirut before it was devastated, back when it was the jewel of the Mediterranean, these ladies had amazing experiences. Just reading about what they saw was an exciting trip. Pan Am is gone now, as are a number of its contemporaries, and travel looks different these days, for better or worse, but "Come Fly the World" is a great read, capturing that era of international travel and the experiences of women who changed not just their world but the face of society going forward.

This book is fascinating history of not only airline stewardesses, but aviation itself. It follows several actual Pan Am Stewardesses, Lynn, Karen, Tori, Clare, and Hazel, and their glamorous and dangerous experiences during the turbulent times between 1965 and 1975. Pan Am went from a mail carrier service to become the first international commercial airlines to travel across the Atlantic. Pan Am became synonymous with extravagance and luxury and Pan Am stewardesses shared in that image. In this book, she describes not only the sexual discrimination, but the weight, age and racial discrimination these women faced as well.

When I started this book, I felt that the book cover was misleading. However, I changed my mind after reading this book. The average employment for these young women was 2 ½ years. It was expected that as these beautiful young women matured and married, they could be replaced with vibrant younger ones to maintain the “fantasy” created by the Airlines. This “fantasy” was definitely illustrated on the cover.

All and all I would recommend to anyone with an interest in the aviation industry.

This was an excellent read. Not only a brief history of Pan Am flight attendants, but aviation in general. Lots of fun trivia about uniforms and training and routes. The author follows a few actual stewardesses through their careers in the 60s and 70s, involving the Vietnam baby lift and women’s rights and politics both domestic and abroad. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and can’t wait to tell my former Pam Am flight attendant aunt about it!

I have always been interested in the history of stewardess' ever since one of my friends told me that his mother was a flight attendant for Pan Am way back when (his words). He told me so many stories about what his mother went through working on the planes, especially after she got secretly married! So, I was excited to see this book on NetGalley. It was really good and it did not feel like information overload, like some history books can do. Instead, breaking it into the different stories of past stewardess' through the years was the best way to do it. We got the information we needed plus it was personal so we could connect with what these women went through, You could feel the excitement and freedom they had during a time where that was limited for women. I wanted to be right up in the sky with them. There were also heavy parts to the history that I did not know about before reading the book, especially about Hong Kong and the Vietnamese children! I hope everyone picks it up once it comes out!

Pan Am Airlines invited passengers to come fly the world - although they weren't the only US airline to fly internationally, they specialized in routes to Europe, Africa, and Asia. I was only 2 years old when the last Pan Am flight flew, and I really knew nothing about Pan Am before picking up this book.

Don't let the cool cover image fool you - this book is not a scandalous tell-all (although there are some juicy moments!) Instead, Julia Cook interweaves the stories of stewardess like Lynne, Tori, and Karen with airline, cultural, and geopolitical history of the period. She covers the role of Pan Am in flying soldiers to and from Vietnam for their tours and R&R, as well as the incredible babylift stories from the end of the war. The feminist elements of the story are very striking - at a time when women could not have bank accounts in their own names, these stewardesses were pioneers in traveling the world. Reading this book was like flying to a new world, and I highly recommend it to those interested in history, feminism, and the 1960s/1970s. 4.5 stars rounded up to 5.

Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for providing an ARC on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Wow, I really enjoyed reading Come Fly The World, about Pan Am airlines in the 1960's. The cover was what attracted me to this book and I am so glad it did! I kept turning the pages, not wanting this to come to an end. I look forward to reading future books by Julia Cooke as I liked her writing style.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.