I honestly wasn’t sure what I was going to get with this book as it was a “read now” book available on NetGalley and was very pleasantly surprised. Each chapter of the book followed a real Pan Am stewardess on her journey with the company. It covered everything from the hiring process, day to day life, to the airline’s involvement with the Vietnam War. Some things I knew, like the strict rules for who could be hired and what rules the women had to live by. Some things I learned, like the details of the flights in and out of Vietnam.

Some non-fiction books are very dry and this was not that. The writing style was easy to read even while dealing with difficult subjects like the Vietnam War, racism, objectification, and sexism. It was very clear that the book was extremely well researched. I was pleased to find that about 25% of my ebook was sources and that the Acknowledgements was full of interviewees names. I will happily read any other books written by Julia Cooke.

Thank you to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Back in the 1960s when I was in 5th grade, our teacher gave us an assignment of doing a short skit showing what we could be doing in a future career. A classmate and I were given the career of stewardesses. The only thing I remember about our skit is we brought in props to serve passengers a meal, and the teacher told us our cutlery placement was all wrong. So much for my short-lived career as a stewardess. But I was a born homebody, so I didn’t have one thought in my head of growing up to be a stewardess anyway.

This book, however, did help me to understand why many young women did choose that career back in the 1960s and ‘70s. It offered travel and adventure like few jobs did back then for women. It was the anti-thesis of wifehood, motherhood, teaching and nursing. Not that many stewardesses didn’t plan on marrying and having children in the future, and nursing in some ways was indeed part of their job; but, for the present time, they were young and free and making enough money to live how they wanted, and do what they wanted; including traveling wherever they wanted, both on and off the job.

Author Julia Cooke focuses on the lives of a few stewardesses in this story, while also showing a much broader image of the career and of commercial flying. She covers the earlier job requirements–age, looks, height and weight, marital status, etc.–and then shows how those changed over the years, often due to the Women’s Rights Movement, as well as the demands of the stewardesses themselves. At one point, many airlines were basically advertising them as sex objects, with one airline even having them wearing hot pants. Some stewardesses obviously didn’t mind the fancy uniforms chosen for them, but others felt comfort and functionality were more important.

Airline travel wasn’t all fun and games, traveling and clothes, however. Besides the threat of fatal crashes, there were multiple planes hijacked to Cuba. (Although, interestingly, some passengers would see those hijackings as more of an exotic diversion than a threat to their lives.) Plus, the Vietnam War years had many stewardesses working on planes taking soldiers to and from R & R, leaving them with mixed feelings about the war effort, and tremendous sadness at the thoughts some of those soldiers would likely be killed in action after returning from R & R. In addition, there was the evacuation of orphans from Vietnam in 1975. Thousands of infants and children were flown out of the country, and some of the stewardesses featured in this book were part of that evacuation, providing eyewitness accounts.

Hence, by the end of this story, those who see flight attendants as nothing but glorified hostesses should have a different view of them. The women profiled were intelligent, highly trained and skilled airline workers, who did everything in their power to make air travel comfortable and safe. They realized the lives and safety of their passengers had to be considered more important than their own lives. That’s what they were paid to do. Yes, the job had some wonderful perks and opportunities, but it was still at times very grueling and very dangerous. Yet some stewardesses could think of doing nothing else. Their life was a continuous adventure, filled with new places and new people. No other job could compare.

Remember when stewardesses were called that and had to wear skirts, be a certain weight, and had to be single? Come Flythe World embarks on the experiences of women who worked for Pan Am. It was fascinating to read about the history and several extended personal stories of women who played integral roles in jet age. I enjoyed reading about the opportunities afforded to these women, but also about the legal battles they had To endure as the world changed in the late 60’s-70s. Seversl,chapters are devoted to the Vietnam War due to Pan Am being the main carrier in and out of Saigon. I remember when Pan Am folded along with 3 other major carriers, especially TWA. Cooke had contributed a readable, knowledgeable book on seversl subject that intersect: women’s history, US history, air travel, social history, and social changes.

This book was so engrossing! I love this time period and the author goes into such detail that you feel as if you are on the plane with these women. I would definitely recommend this book to friends and family.

*I was given early access to this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*

I was really interested in picking up Come Fly The World by Julia Cook, which focuses on Pan Am flight attendants (referred to at the time and in the book as stewardesses), because I wanted to get a deeper look into the lives of these women who I've only really seen in Mad Men like depictions and sexist ads from the time. And boy was I not disappointed! Julia Cook's writing style is very easy to read and draws you into the lives of these women, whether it's in the day to day of their flights or in the women trying to end workplace discrimination.  It's a must read if you're even vaguely interested in aviation history or travel history.

The sections of the book that I found the most interesting and compelling were the ones dealing with the Vietnam War and the experiences the women had not only with the soldiers but also the refugees fleeing the war. By far the most moving was the chapter talking about airlifting the children, most of them infants, out of Vietnam during the month before the war ended. This was something about the war I hadn't really heard talked about as much as the experiences of soldiers or the anti war movement and is something I definitely want to look into more in the future.

4.25 stars

Having a brother who was a steward for Pan Am from the late 70s to 1988, I found this book extremely interesting.

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.

I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to start my 2021 nonfiction reading off right with this brilliant book… because it was engaging, insightful, educational, and so wonderfully feminist!

Come Fly the World is here to tear down all of the regressive, one-dimensional perceptions of Pan-Am stewardesses that have persisted through the decades.

These women were not shallow, docile women whose sole purpose in life was to look beautiful and serve men… they were adventurers, thrill-seekers, boundary-breakers, feminists, and emboldened women decades before their time.

As a child of the Spice Girl era, I didn’t experience Pan-Am’s heyday first-hand growing up, but I really enjoy learning about pop culture movements and modern American history, and I especially love stories about women subverting societal rules and breaking down barriers within those worlds.

I found Come Fly the World to be incredibly enlightening from a historical standpoint, but sometimes the sections that focused on the business history of Pan-Am as a company felt a bit dry. What really stood out to me though, were the in-depth, personal stories of numerous stewardesses, like Lynne, Tori, and Karen, which gave the book a more intimate, personal feel and helped me connect to the piece as a whole.

As a woman who loves to travel, I felt such a camaraderie with each of these women, whose sense of adventure and desire to experience and learn about the world transcended all other things… even, at times, their own safety. I am in awe of their boldness, their ambition, and their ability to live their lives to the fullest, and their stories have made me even more excited to get back on a plane and explore the world, as soon as it is once again safe to do so.

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.