Review by Choice Review
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner McCullough exhibits his artist's touch in re-creating the lives of the Wright brothers, their father, and their sister Katharine from historical documents. Mining their letters, notebooks, and diaries, McCullough shows the Wright brothers (snubbed by the British as mere bicycle mechanics) for the important technoscientists they were. With only high school educations, they personified self-reliance and ingenuity, making their own calculations and testing their mechanical skills as they experimented with gliders. Their solution to controlling the gliders' flight was wing warping, enabling the gliders to bank like a bird's wings. As early engine designers and mechanics, when they couldn't find a light enough engine, they designed one that their mechanic built in six weeks. A few days after Langley's $70,000 failure, the Wright brothers made several powered flights--for less than $1,000--to prove that humans could fly. When the US military rejected their services, the Wrights signed a contract with a French syndicate. From 1910 on, the brothers were much occupied by business and patent infringement lawsuits. Wilbur contracted typhoid and died in 1912, but Orville lived until 1948. The brothers were remarkable for their analytical minds, their skiIl as early pilots, and their brilliance as experimental scientists. This work is their great, eminently readable story. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels. --Robin Higham, emeritus, Kansas State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
IT'S BEEN NEARLY half a century since David McCullough published "The Johnstown Flood," which initiated his career as our matchless master of popular history. His 10th book, "The Wright Brothers," has neither the heft of his earlier volumes nor, in its intense focus on a short period in its subjects' lives, the grandness of vision that made those works as ambitious as they were compelling. Yet this is nonetheless unmistakably McCullough: a story of timeless importance, told with uncommon empathy and fluency. It does not begin promisingly. The first 30 or so pages consist of a somewhat desultory recounting of early years in the Wright household. But then 32-year-old Wilbur writes a letter to the Smithsonian, requesting any papers they have, or know of, regarding human flight. "I am an enthusiast," he assures whoever might open the letter, "but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine." Did he ever. There is no fortuity in the Wright brothers' saga as related by McCullough, no unexpected events that changed their course. Except for Orville's startling emergence from a horrible wreck during one of his flights, there's not even any luck. Neither brother attended college, nor had been trained in physics or engineering, yet each step they took was not only correct but in many cases brilliant, and in nearly all cases original. That every one of those steps was also achieved through excruciating patience and obsessive attention to detail does not diminish the only word that can express what Wilbur, particularly, possessed: genius. McCullough shows how endless calculation, application and recalculation led them to determine the proper shape of the wing, the means of manipulating its angle into the wind, how to compensate for the weight of the engine. They crafted a sophisticated wind tunnel from a wooden box and a gas-powered fan, and employed a dazzling piece of reasoning to create an innovative propeller. When no automobile manufacturer could supply them with a suitable motor, they collaborated with a local mechanic to design their own. Even their solution to the vexing problem of how to launch an ungainly, wheel-less contraption into the air - fundamentally, an adaptation of a medieval catapult - was an elegant demonstration of the creativity of their thinking and the intimacy of their collaboration. "They lived in the same house," McCullough writes, "worked together six days a week, ate their meals together, kept their money in a joint bank account, even 'thought together,' Wilbur said." Neither brother ever married or, apparently, had romantic attachments. The most important woman in their life was their younger sister, Katharine, whose steadfast devotion to her brilliant brothers would be difficult to accept as anything but cliché were it not for the evidence in her correspondence with her brothers. These letters are a large part of the record of what happened at Kitty Hawk, N.C., ideal material for McCullough's narrative gifts as he unreels the unlikely story that took place on that thin strip of beach. The Wrights had the good wishes and eager cooperation of the few local families scattered along this section of the Outer Banks, but otherwise they might have been on the moon. They had to dig for potable water. They built their own lodgings and caught their own fish. During high winds, Orville told Katharine, "the sand fairly blinds us. It blows across the ground in clouds." At other times, mosquitoes appeared "in the form of a mighty cloud, almost darkening the sun" and "chewed us clear through our underwear and socks." On some of their Kitty Hawk sojourns - they encamped there five times over a nine-year period - the brothers subsisted in their bleak isolation as much as 10 weeks at a time. But hardship was irrelevant to the Wrights. They knew they were doing something historic. And from the moment of their first flight - those famous 12 seconds achieved on Dec. 17, 1903 - they knew it would be of immense financial value. What happened after Kitty Hawk is, in some ways, the most unlikely part of their story. Shockingly, their achievement drew almost no notice until 1906, when Scientific American acknowledged the brothers by challenging their honesty - if they had really flown, the magazine suggested, reporters would have let the world know by now. But in 1904 and 1905, they made more than 150 separate flights, one of them lasting 38 minutes and covering 24 miles - not in remote Kitty Hawk but over open land, a 40-minute trolley ride from booming Dayton, Ohio. Newspapermen who became aware of their efforts simply didn't believe what they heard. And if they took the trouble to wander out to investigate, they apparently didn't even believe their eyes. Similarly, when the Wrights' congressman helped them approach the War Department to gauge the Army's interest in their achievement, they were met by yawns. Not that the brothers really had a grip on the military potential of manned flight: In their letter, they suggested that airplanes might someday be used for "scouting and carrying messages in time of war." A patent for the Wright Flying Machine was finally issued in 1906. A year later, Wilbur was in Paris, engaged in six months of murky negotiations with the French government. When he wasn't dodging reporters, he spent most of his time wandering the city and visiting its museums. (He especially liked Corot's luminous skies.) It wasn't until the spring of 1908 that the Wrights were able to capture the attention of their own country. Nearly five years after their epochal breakthrough, they returned to Kitty Hawk to show their plane to the press. Even then, one reporter wrote, "this spectacle of men flying was so startling, so bewildering to the senses . . . that we all stood like so many marble men." "The Wright Brothers" is in no sense a biography, compressing the last two years of Wilbur's life (he died of typhoid fever in 1912) and the last 38 of Orville's into eight pages. We do learn that when Katharine married, at 52, Orville stopped speaking to her, relenting only as she lay on her deathbed. The hotly contested patent lawsuits are acknowledged, but not explored; the wealth the brothers accumulated is tallied, but the terms under which it was collected go unexplained. In 1910, Wilbur told a close associate, "It is our view that morally the world owes its almost universal use of our system of lateral control entirely to us." The man replied, "I am afraid, my friend, that your usually sound judgment has been warped by the desire for great wealth." In his brief epilogue, McCullough tells us that in the years leading up to his death, Wilbur was consumed by "business matters and acrimonious lawsuits." When I finished the book, I rushed to Wikipedia to find out more - and when a reader has to go to Wikipedia, he must be pretty hard up. But now I'm grinding a useless ax: Why review the book the author didn't write? David McCullough is interested in only one thing, namely how it was possible that two autodidacts from Ohio managed to satisfy a longing that the species had harbored for centuries. "The Wright Brothers" is merely this: a story, well told, about what might be the most astonishing feat mankind has ever accomplished. As the comic Louis C.K. has said, reprovingly, to those who complain about the inconveniences and insults of modern air travel: "You're sitting. In a chair. In the SKY!!" Which is saying a lot. On its own terms, "The Wright Brothers" soars. DANIEL OKRENT'S most recent book is "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition." He is working on a book about the origins of scientific racism.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Fairly or not, Orville and Wilbur Wright will always be best remembered by the general public for December 17, 1903, the day at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, when the brothers flew, for the first time, a heavier-than-air vehicle. Of course, the brothers had accomplishments and interesting lives that both preceded and followed that triumphant day, as this fine biography by esteemed historian McCullough shows. McCullough offers an interesting portrait of their youth in Dayton, Ohio, that also serves as an examination of daily life in post-Civil War Middle America. Neither boy had a formal education beyond high school, although Wilbur's plan to attend Yale was thwarted by an injury. Yet both displayed keen intelligence and strong interest in various mechanical devices. That interest led to their ownership of both print and bicycle shops, but their interest in the possibility of human flight soon became an obsession for them. McCullough illustrates their creative geniuses as well as their physical courage leading up to the initial flight. He also pays tribute to an unsung hero, their sister Katherine, who played a prominent role in their achievements. This is an outstanding saga of the lives of two men who left such a giant footprint on our modern age. High-Demand Backstory: This author's countless previous bestsellers demand that public libraries have his latest book in their shelves.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Mechanical invention is close to a religious calling in this reverent biography of the pioneers of heavier-than-air flight. Pulitzer-winning historian McCullough (Truman) sees something exalted in the two bicycle mechanics and lifelong bachelors who lived with their sister and clergyman father in Dayton, Ohio. He finds them-especially Wilbur, the elder brother-to be cultured men with a steady drive and quiet charisma, not mere eccentrics. McCullough follows their monkish devotion to the goal of human flight, recounting their painstaking experiments in a homemade wind tunnel, their countless wrong turns and wrecked models, and their long stints roughing it on the desolate, buggy shore at Kitty Hawk, N.C. Thanks largely to their own caginess, the brothers endured years of doubt and ridicule while they improved their flyer. McCullough also describes the fame and adulation that the brothers received after public demonstrations in France and Washington, D.C., in 1908 cemented their claims. His evident admiration for the Wrights leads him to soft-pedal their crasser side, like their epic patent lawsuits, which stymied American aviation for years. Still, McCullough's usual warm, evocative prose makes for an absorbing narrative; he conveys both the drama of the birth of flight and the homespun genius of America's golden age of innovation. Photos. Agent: Mort Janklow, Janklow & Nesbit. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
Most Americans learn at a young age about the Wright Brothers and their momentous flight at Kitty Hawk, NC, in 1906 but know little beyond the basic facts. Now McCullough (Truman) brings readers the story of how the brothers, with only high school educations, were able successfully to design, build, and fly the first heavier-than-air machine carrying a human. Although the book starts out slowly, it gains momentum as McCullough takes readers step by step through the invention and early flights, especially at Kitty Hawk, to the exciting times later when the brothers flew ever higher and longer for large crowds in France and England as well as in the United States, risking their lives with each attempt. Both brothers sustained injuries in serious crashes. The author, a flight enthusiast himself, does a capable job narrating. Verdict This book will appeal to McCullough's many fans, to history buffs, and to readers interested in a story that celebrates the American Dream. ["Highly recommended for academicians interested in the history of flight, transportation, or turn-of-the-century America; general readers; and all libraries": LJ 4/1/15 starred review of the S. & S. hc.]-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A charmingly pared-down life of the "boys" that grounds their dream of flight in decent character and work ethic. There is a quiet, stoical awe to the accomplishments of these two unprepossessing Ohio brothers in this fluently rendered, skillfully focused study by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning and two-time National Book Award-winning historian McCullough (The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, 2011, etc.). The author begins with a brief yet lively depiction of the Wright home dynamic: reeling from the death of their mother from tuberculosis in 1889, the three children at home, Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine, had to tend house, as their father, an itinerant preacher, was frequently absent. McCullough highlights the intellectual stimulation that fed these bookish, creative, close-knit siblings. Wilbur was the most gifted, yet his parents' dreams of Yale fizzled after a hockey accident left the boy with a mangled jaw and broken teeth. The boys first exhibited their mechanical genius in their print shop and then in their bicycle shop, which allowed them the income and space upstairs for machine-shop invention. Dreams of flight were reawakened by reading accounts by Otto Lilienthal and other learned treatises and, specifically, watching how birds flew. Wilbur's dogged writing to experts such as civil engineer Octave Chanute and the Smithsonian Institute provided advice and response, as others had long been preoccupied by controlled flight. Testing their first experimental glider took the Wrights over several seasons to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to experiment with their "wing warping" methods. There, the strange, isolated locals marveled at these most "workingest boys," and the brothers continually reworked and repaired at every step. McCullough marvels at their success despite a lack of college education, technical training, "friends in high places" or "financial backers"they were just boys obsessed by a dream and determined to make it reality. An educational and inspiring biography of seminal American innovators. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
