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THE FLYERS

Name: THE FLYERS
Author: Noah Adams
ISBN: 1-4000-4912-1

IN SEARCH OF WILBUR AND ORVILLE WRIGHT

by Noah Adams ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2003

Pleasant and unchallenging.

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
FAR APPALACHIA
by Noah Adams

- BOOK REVIEW
PIANO LESSONS
by Noah Adams

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)