I chose this book from the hundred currently on my shelf in America because I recently enjoyed reading David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback and wanted another well-documented and insightful book from the era of the late 19th century.

I had actually already begun McCullough’s The Paths Between the Seas but couldn’t seem to get into it, mainly because I’m unfamiliar with South American geography and French politics. I think I’ll delay that read until I get through Theodore Rex and have greater American context to drive my interest in the Panama Canal.

This book introduces us not only to the Wright Brothers as the title suggests, but also to their younger sister Katherine and their Father, The Bishop, both of whom play an important role in the brothers’ character and development. I really like this aspect of McCullough’s research and writing, for as he delves deeply into the letters and journals of those intimately involved in the lives of his subjects, he recognizes how vivacious those side characters were themselves and helps us readers get a sense of it as well. This was one aspect that set Mornings on Horseback apart from Edmund Morris’ The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.

I found it interesting that this book did not deal much with the brothers’ early lives. His first chapter, “Beginnings,” mentions how tragically the loss of their mother hit the family, and it described some of their earlier experiences that help encourage them towards the study of flight—incidents such as the dreadful hockey hit and the gift of the French “helicopter”—-but it did not delve into some of the other telling stories that I’ve read elsewhere.

In the children’s book Wilbur and Orville Wright: The Flight to Adventure, for example, author Louis Sabin spent 38 pages telling of many childhood adventures that McCullough ignored, and only five pages on their studies, practices, and successes in flight! I get that Sabin’s book was geared towards children, but the stories were so fascinating that McCullough’s readers could have learned a great deal from them too. The only speculation I have is that possibly, in his research, he discovered these stories weren’t entirely true.

I breezed right through The Wright Brothers, enjoying this simple study of these great American inventors. As with his other books, McCullough also evidences a particular goal in his research and writing. In Mornings on Horseback, for example, McCullough sought to clarify how Teedie’s childhood asthma impacted him as an adult. In this book, he seeks to “set the record straight” about the many misconceptions history has thrown at these famous and inventive brothers.

Certainly, Wilbur and Orville were not the only men trying to unlock the secrets of human flight during those years, and certainly they weren’t the only ones to find moderate success. They were however the only ones to self-finance their research of the mechanics of flight, the only ones to develop and patent the concept of wing-warping, and absolutely they were the first men to fly for considerable distances and lengths of times, breaking and then re-breaking every world record in the realm of aeronautics within their first year of public flight. These guys weren’t the first to fly, but even the flyers of their day acknowledged that they were the first to perfect human flight to such perfection, and that they also were simply the best.

The character that these brothers displayed as well, their shyness, humility, and uncompromising standards, was perhaps the main thing to stand out in this book. McCullough’s portrait of these brothers includes their warts, sure, but it emphasizes their strength of character, their ingenuity, and (as President Howard Taft pointed out) their distinctly American go-gettum attitude and work ethic. This came in large part due to the influence of their bishop father.

I really enjoyed this book. It’s perhaps David McCullough’s lightest read and would thus serve as an excellent introductory piece to anyone interested in trying him out. I’ve still Got Truman and John Adams on my shelf and 1776 on my Kindle. I’ll not be going anywhere for a while, but at least I shan’t get bored.

©2020 E.T.