Volume 1 relates the story of the invention of the airplane by the Wright brothers and the creation of the original aeronautical research establishment in the United States.

The year is 1948; the place, Samakh, a small town on Lake Tiberias, north of Jerusalem. People in Samakh are waiting -- for what, exactly, they do not yet know. The whistle of the Haifa-Deraa train doesn't sound anymore. Abd al-Karim, the shopkeeper, no longer goes into the city to buy new stock. You townspeople, says Haj Mahmoud, leader of the fighters in the 1936 rebellion, had better start digging trenches. There are dark days ahead. A Lake Beyond the Wind is a novel about the most catastrophic year in Palestinian history, a time marked by violent clashes between Zionist forces and the volunteers of the Arab Liberation Army. Yakhlif tenderly gathers all the town folk, the soldiers of the beleaguered army, the animals of the natural world into his tale, which makes it all the more powerful a lament for a world that is no more.

The airplane ranks as one of history's most ingenious and phenomenal inventions. It has surely been one of the most world changing. How ideas about aerodynamics first came together and how the science and technology evolved to forge the airplane into the revolutionary machine that it became is the epic story told in this six-volume series, The Wind and Beyond: A Documentary Journey through the History of Aerodynamics in America. Following up on Volume I's account of the invention of the airplane and the creation of the original aeronautical research establishment in the United States, Volume II explores the airplane design revolution of the 1920s and 1930s and the quest for improved airfoils. Subsequent volumes cover the aerodynamics of airships, flying boats, rotary-wing aircraft, breaking the sound barrier, and more.