Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer

A Granddaughter remembers her wartime hero.


He was only five years old when a local barnstormer offered to take young Bill Brown for a flight in a biplane in exchange for one of his mother's home-cooked meals. That day birthed a life-long fascination with aviation. As a young man, he grew up near the home of the man who would become the most famous pilot of the Second World War-Jimmy Doolittle of the “Doolittle Raiders.” By twenty-one, Brown had earned his own wings and found himself as a flying P-51 Mustang fighter pilot performing daring raids from battlefields like Iwo Jima. Ultimately he was shot down during a combat mission over Japan, but would live to become a dynamic servant of the Cross. Bill Brown is now the subject of a thrilling story of combat, faith, and fatherhood told through the eyes of granddaughter Kelly Brown. In Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer, a beautiful, pictorially rich book, Kelly recounts the life of her flyboy grandfather as a letter to generations yet to be born. One of the most encouraging books you will read this year.