The Wright Brothers

I am not normally a reader of non-fiction let alone historical near-biographical non-fiction. Having said that, this was an extremely interesting book written about the Wright brothers. It was recommended to me by a coworker who knew nothing about my reading habits but he talked it up so much that I had to give it a try and I was not disappointed.
Reading about the early 1900s really puts into perspective the differences in attitudes and the differences in how we react to new inventions; new technologies. Its easy to become jaded and apathetic about the insane things that come out these days. Reading about the excitement and wonder of watching a plane fly really puts those things into perspective.

Interestingly, I went from reading this book to Mary Roach's Packing for Mars. David McCullough's style, of course, is more descriptive from a historian's point of view. He dwells mostly on the period when the Wright Brothers worked tirelessly to invent their contraption that led to human flight.

He does offer painstaking details in documenting their efforts at developing their invention but Wright brothers didn't accord him much drama to get excited about. Perhaps that's a good thing but the Kitty Hawk experiments were vividly described and perhaps were the best part of the book; after which it starts to lag. I preferred McCullough's John Adams but perhaps that was the nature of the time period he was writing about. Getting excited by brothers who undoubtedly worked hard and by the dint of their labor and ingenuity gave us the greatest invention of all perhaps wasn't meant to be.

Overall, I would still recommend this book just so you can learn more about the process of invention which mostly isn't about one ‘Eureka' moment but hours of continually slaving over and perfecting your invention to solve one tiny problem. Rest may or may not fall in place. All said and done, they were still the Wright stuff!

I didn't know much about the Wright Brothers before I read this David McCullough book. I didn't know the brothers were close. I didn't know the brothers never married. I didn't know that they lived with their sister and their father until they died. I didn't know that the brothers had no formal education past high school. I didn't know that the brothers learned many of the concepts they used in their invention of the airplane from their bicycle shop.

I learned a lot about the Wright Brothers from this great book.
A song sticks in my head from a childhood Golden record I had...”The Wright Brothers were right....”

Short Review: I love David McCullough. But it has been a while since I have picked up any of his books. A trip to the Smithsonian Air and Space museum (the one at Dulles airport) prompted me to pick up this biography. I knew the basic story, but it was the details that McCullough really made interesting. It is also a good reminder about how quickly the airplane went from impossibility to significant role in the world.

My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/wright/

Excellent as always, as expected from David McCullough. I resisted reading for quite some time as I am not overly interested in the birth of the airplane. However, the book went on sale and I am so glad I grabbed it and read it. Wilbur and Orville, and their sister prove that if you find your path and work hard enough at it you can have more success than you ever dreamed possible.

It is hard to believe that from where they started, spending hours studying the flight of birds, figuring out – with no college education or particular training – how to master the wind, we were able to send a man to the moon only 65 or so years later.

Getting through the book was definitely a slog. The style is exceedingly dry, mostly a collection of facts one after another with very little insight. There are a lot small filler facts that seem totally out of place. By the time I realized the book was a bore and not getting any better, I was already one third of the book in and decided to power through it, mostly because I was interested in the story.
One of the key points that weaken this book is that the author repeats again and again (and again and again) how great was the moral fortitude of the brothers, to the point of becoming annoying, and doing so, the author decided to absolutely brush over the darker parts of the personalities of the brothers with the goal of preserving a perfect memory of a great American Story. By throwing objectivity and completeness out of the window, I think he obtained this flat recount of facts filtered to only put the brothers in good light. Questionable...

Specific to the audiobook: the choice of the author to narrate the book himself is an unfortunate one. He is not a gifted actor and his execution is monotone at best.