Adventure, romance and deception fly to new heights during the best of times in the nation's history.
In her new book Blue Skies, Green Hell, author Marilyn Lazzari-Wing shares her real-life drama as the wife of a bush pilot in the uncharted wilderness in 1950s Venezuela.
"The skies were still blue, but I couldn't dismiss the risky missions my husband flew over the jungles we called green hell," says Lazzari-Wing. "We became champions at saying goodbye."
An integral part of her husband's operations, she details her five years spent in the cockpit of planes with six basic instruments, limited-range radios and lack of weather reports.
Lazzari-Wing relearned how to fly planes at flight school at 74 years old, sifted through a thousand old letters and revisited Venezuela to accurately retell her story as a bush pilot's wife.
Blue Skies, Green Hell is also the story of a young girl who married after a whirlwind two-week courtship, moved from sophisticated New York to wilderness Venezuela post-World War II and developed business competence at the time when women's rights were a deep undercurrent issue.
Blue Skies, Green Hell
By Marilyn Lazzari-Wing
ISBN: 978-1-4653-4929-3
Softcover retail price: $19.99
Hardcover retail price: $29.99
E-book price: $3.99
Marilyn Lazzari-Wing, following her aviation years, developed and implemented a program across the United States to further women's rights in the 1970s. She traveled coast-to-coast to lead motivational seminars, survey sales representatives and evaluate her program for women in sales. She's won many awards for her work, including one from the then-governor of Tennessee. An avid traveler, she continues to hot-air balloon, kayak and scuba dive in remote corners of the world with her husband. She lectures on world travel.
Videos