Ships in The Sky  Great Airship Disasters of the World by Toland. John,

Hard back book with colour pictorial dust jacket, 260 pages illustrated by B/W plates, 11 chapters, epilogue and index.
The author tells the whole story of dirigibles, of the adventurous men who developed them and flew them, of the great flights and death flights that made them admired and feared beyond all other means of transportation.
He tells of Santos-Dumont, the dapper little Brazilian millionaire, whose aerial escapades over Paris won him international fame , and of the spectacular progress of the dirigible in Germany under Count von Zeppelin and Dr. Hugo Eckener.

He describes the terrible half-hour over Ada, Ohio, when the Shenandoah, caught between two line squalls, was gradually twisted and torn apart as if by two giant hands; the momentous flights of General Umberto Nobile, and his harrowing thirty days on polar ice with the survivors of the Italia; what happened to the R-38 and R-101; and how passengers, crew, ground crew, and eyewitnesses survived the demoniac thirty - four - second blaze of the Hindenburg.
The great ships, the great adventures, the great airship men - all are here, established by creative research and presented in an almost photographic prose.