Pleasant and unchallenging.
NPR correspondent Adams (Far Appalachia, 2001, etc.) celebrates the brothers from Dayton, Ohio, and events that changed the world, beginning with the first flight at Kitty Hawk 100 years ago.
The author is a firm believer in the technique of absorbing the dry facts of research material and then revisiting key venues at which historical events took place in order to receive whatever evocations remain firsthand. To wit: Kitty Hawk, of course, and Huffman Prairie near Dayton (first airfield in the US), forgotten airfields in France, or Governors Island in New York Harbor, site of a memorable 1909 air show and competition. This may engender inspiration but also, in Adams’s case, the kind of lilting, almost stream-of-consciousness digression that plays charmingly on the radio but not necessarily to readers hungry for keener insight into the principal subjects. The author does not, for instance, analyze methodologies the Wrights employed to obtain useful aerodynamic data that initially lay far beyond the scope of their limited background (neither was college educated or technically trained). Instead, actual correspondence among the brothers, their father, and their devoted sister Katharine is “played” to indicate what may have been running through Orville or Wilbur’s mind at “this very spot.” Adams aims for immediacy and awe, not necessarily revelation. The closeness of Katharine, unwed until she was 52, to her lifelong bachelor brothers (particularly to Orville after Wilbur’s death) is mentioned without the insinuations others have offered. The Wrights’ obsession to protect and extend their patents is duly noted, but not the extent of their legalistic hounding of rivals like Glenn Curtiss, which some historians consider to have actually retarded aviation technology. Still, a clear portrait emerges of the tenacity and homespun intelligence shared by brothers who pushed modest ambitions well beyond what either had dared dream.
Pleasant and unchallenging.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-4912-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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