A sensitive portrayal of a side of the Wright brothers that’s too often neglected.
An offbeat account of the lives of Orville and Wilbur Wright, the first men to achieve flight.
The story of the Wright brothers’ engineering triumph is a familiar one that many authors have covered from many different angles. But debut author Dempsey attempts to stake out new historical ground by offering an account of their family’s support, their intellectual influences, and their emotional struggles. She tells of how, at an early age, both Wright brothers displayed intellectual precociousness and how their parents encouraged them. Their father, Milton, was a minister and an enthusiastic bibliophile, and Susan, their mother, was college-educated, a rarity for women in the late 1800s. Since Milton traveled frequently for church business, Susan largely ran the household, and her bond with the boys was strong; her death from tuberculosis in 1889 was devastating to them. Dempsey points out that they also had a close relationship with their sister, Katharine, who postponed a semester at Ohio’s Oberlin College to nurse Orville back to health when he suffered a bout of typhoid fever. Although the brothers were always busily employed, either with their printing business, their bicycle shop, or their obsession with inventing the first true airplane, they were still deeply involved in family affairs, the author says; for example, Wilbur even helped his father navigate some intramural church controversies. Dempsey unquestionably traverses some well-trodden ground in this biography when dealing with the brothers’ trial-and-error inventing as well as their dogged defense of patents in the aftermath of success. But her most valuable contribution to the already inexhaustible literature on the Wrights is how she manages to effectively capture the personal, day-to-day context of their ceaseless labors as well as their undying friendship with each other. Also, she effectively reveals how Katharine was truly a central figure in their lives as well as a fascinating person in her own right—she was both a teacher and an active participant in the women’s rights movement.
A sensitive portrayal of a side of the Wright brothers that’s too often neglected.Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 978-1-4120-0146-5
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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