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only the local citizens but also the burgeoning influx of artists who came to Cincinnati to train and work. Indeed, their patronage benefited several artists before they achieved national and international recognition. Tbe Cincinnati Wing celebrates the city,as well as its individual artists and movers and shakers. In 1853 Sarah Worthington King Peter, organizer of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, founded the Cincinnati's Ladies Academy of Fine Arts to provide women with an artistic education and help cultivate public taste. Several years later, in 1881, the Cincinnati Art Museum was established . Julie Aronson, the catalog's editor, notes that no other artist is more intimately connected to Cincinnati than the rugged nineteenth century realist painter Frank Duveneck, who grew up in Cincinnati. Rebuking academic stylistic norms and prettified subject matter, Duveneck depicted the lower working classes,their children,and their world. Helping to initiate a new style that broke with the past and fit in with progressive ideas, he later taught at the museum and endowed it with his own collection. The history of the visual arts in Cincinnati is one of assimilation followed by a proliferation of indigenous creativity, including the decorative arts that are integrated throughout the beautifully appointed catalog. The city's luxuryoriented Rookwood Pottery Company, an aesthetic venture that became a commercial success,was internationally acclaimed in the latenineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, but its fame does not dominate the discussion of the decorative arts. Both Maria Longworth Nichols Storer and Mary Louise McLaughlin,the " dueling divas of Cincinnati Ceramics" ( 106), made major contributions to art pottery,as well as metalwork. Not well known,Anna Maria Riis and Edna Boise Hopkins also contributed to and excelled in the applied arts. Mixing beauty with practicality,women in nineteenthcentury Cincinnati took up wood carving to decorate their homes. Taught by Benn Pitman, a proponent of the Aesthetic Movement, they carved exquisite picture frames, caskets, hatboxes ,and furniture with elaborate nature inspired motifs,such as fauna and birds. These lesserknown women offer evidence of a strong female presence in the American applied arts. Their careers,as well as Cincinnati' s women's art clubs and training schools, have not yet been documented. Although a long history of wealth, initiative and diverse creativity guided Cincinnati into the twentieth century, its contributions to American art production have not been fully studied. Tbe Cincinnati Wing contains a plethora of in formation to complement American history, instill civic pride in Cincinnatians, and provide art historians with new venues of research. Carmen Stonge Duquesne University Julian William Cummings with Gwendolyn Kay Cummings. Grassbopper Pilot: A Memoir. Kent,OH: The Kent State University Press, 2005. 92 pp. ISBN: 087338821 cloth), $ 19.95. TheprimaryauthorofthisbookwasaU.S. Army Air Forces light plane pilot during preWorld War II maneuvers,and in North Africa, Sicily,Italy,and the Pacific. Commissioned an ROTC Field Artillery lieutenant upon graduating from the University of Utah in 1941, Cummings learned to fly in Civil Aeronautics Administration Pilot Course Two. Soon after going on active duty in mid1942 ,he flew an L4 Piper Cub spotter plane in combat in the Third Infantry Division during Operation TORCH, the invasion of North Africa in November, 1942. In late July 1943, during the Sicilian campaign,he received the Distinguished Service Cross for having taken off from the improvised deck of an LST ( Landing Ship Tank) and reporting enemy movements during the assault phase while under heavy enemy fire for two anda half hours OHIO VALLEY HISTORY BOOK REVIEWS 78 tographs do shine through. Grassbopper Pilot is a quick and easy read that does manage to convey some of the lura of light aviation (" real flying" in the award was signed by then Lieutenant General George S. Patton,Jr.). Later in the war,he became involved in technical modifications of the L4 , including rockets and television gear. Designated by thenGeneral of the Army Douglas MacArthur to play a key role in the opening phase of the invasion of Japan, Cummings was training for that mission when the war ended. Despite often interesting anecdotes and textures, Grassbopper Pilot is at once too brief, rambling , and uneven in style, and : r occasion ally lunges into purple ' prose ( 35...

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