American Icarus

This is the story of Joe Carroll: fully paid-up member of the Greatest Generation, aviator, farmer, and handsome Irish charmer who radiated exuberance for lifea literal and metaphorical flying boy. With his head in the clouds, this American Icarus embodied all that was aspirational and attractive about mid-twentieth-century America, with its technical ingenuity, bravado, and its belief that the only way was up. But Joe was also a destructive, impulsive alcoholic; like many of that generation he