Wilbur and Orville Wright: The Flight to Adventure by Louis Sabin (1983)

I recently read David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers, a thorough version of the Wright boys’ story written for adults. In keeping with my turn-of-the-century readings as of late and to supplement what I’d learned from McCullough about these boys from Dayton, OH, I ran to this children’s book as well—the only other account I have on my shelf.

While McCullough’s book focuses almost exclusively on Wilbur and Orville as adults and their pursuit of human flight, this little book barely mentions it! Instead it fictionalizes a number of anecdotes from their childhood that show the boys’ growing interest in physics and in machines in general, leaving only the final few pages to tell us about how they used that information to eventually build a successful flying machine.

While I understand that this book is designed for children, and I shouldn’t be surprised that it focuses mainly on their childhood, I also wouldn’t call this book a very good biography or Wilbur and Orville Wright. If a teacher or parent knows the intent of the book, that it hopes to encourage children to have a thirst for learning, then all is well. But if they assign this book for reading to a child and then ask, “From Sabin’s book, how did Wilbur and Orville change the world?” a child would be hard-pressed to find the answer.

With that said, I actually really enjoyed the book as a supplement to McCullough’s far more authoritative biography, because it shares many telling anecdotes that McCullough himself didn’t consider worthy to print. I sort of wish I had read this little book immediately after I read McCullough’s first chapter, but no one provided me with a reading schedule.

This book was a totally random find for me, so I know neither the author nor the illustrator, and I’ve never heard of Troll Associates. John Lawn’s illustrations are an interestingly splotchy two-tone, but I sort of doubt the book enjoyed a long life of reprints.

If you ever come across it, enjoy it for the interesting anecdotes it shares, but don’t go out of your way for it.

©2020 E.T.