TO FLY

Old (Wright Brothers: Inventors of the Airplane, 2000) aims for a (somewhat) younger audience with this fresh account of the brothers’ early years and their methodical quest. An oversized format offers enough space to make almost all of 15 chapters only one page long and she’s chosen just the right amount of information for each plus an epilogue. With careful documentation of the instances that include speech, this reads comfortably like a story, but is clearly nonfiction. Parker, whose art is so essential to the depiction of Jackson Pollock in Action Jackson (p. 1223) here uses his loosely drawn watercolors to add more atmosphere than information. Still readers will come away with not only a clearer picture of the false starts and systematic experimentation that led to the flight at Kitty Hawk as well as some basic understanding about aerodynamics, but how Wilbur and Orville combined complementary skills and temperaments to make such a brilliant team. (timeline, bibliography, index) (Biography. 7-9)