The Wright Brothers: Book Review

The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough, tells the story of Orville and Wilbur Wright, aviation pioneers who solved the puzzle of powered flight and changed the world forever. McCullough, best known for his lengthy biographies John Adams and Truman, delivers a briefer book to tell the story of the Wright Brothers, but it is no less compelling or lacking in the detail one has come to expect from his works.

The Wright Brothers provides the obligatory look at the Wright’s early life in Dayton, Ohio, introducing the reader to their family, including a mother who died young, their father, Bishop Milton Wright, and their sister, Katherine. The book also briefly covers their entrepreneurial efforts, the bicycle repair and manufacturing shop that helped pay for their aviation experiments, but focuses mainly on their efforts to design and build a flying machine. The Wright’s were meticulous experimenters, working with gliders at Dayton and later at Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It was at Kitty Hawk that they would achieve their goal, powered flight, but the story didn’t end there. Skepticism that the Wrights had accomplished anything at Kitty Hawk followed them for many years, but they knew they had to perfect their techniques and engineering. They were unwilling to rush through their experiments, and eventually their patience and attention to detail paid off. Their demonstration flights in France and Fort Meyer, Virginia became the stuff of legend. 

Like his books on Truman and Adams, McCullough has again produced the definitive biography of his chosen subject, providing a well-researched and informative history of the birth of powered flight and the men who perfected it. The Wright Brothers tells an inspiring story of the triumph of American ingenuity.

September Events

Two events for writers (and readers) are coming up on the third weekend of September, the Williamsburg Book Festival...

...and the Hampton Roads Writers Conference.

For those who wish to attend both, the Hampton Roads Writers Conference does have a one-day rate. You can attend on Friday the 19th and go to the Williamsburg Book Festival on the 20th.

Book Report 6/29/14

Currently Reading (nonfiction): The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond

Diamond continues to explore how traditional societies work, and how the people in them deal with conflict, justice, childrearing, the elderly and other issues. He points out that one of the benefits of modern state society is in how imposed systems of justice are able to breakdown patterns of vengeance that can fuel wars or prolong conflict among tribal peoples. The lack of a central authority with a monopoly on the use of force allows for individuals and families to seek revenge on their own, acts that usually trigger new waves of retribution. In state societies disinterested courts and law enforcement agencies provide justice without pandering to the impulse for revenge.

In some ways traditional societies offer better models for dealing with restitution in cases involving unintended injury or death. Rather than focusing on mere compensation as a means of resolving these incidents, traditional societies focus on making a sincere apology for the pain caused to the injured parties. Performing rituals that demonstrate genuine remorse can diffuse a situation that might devolve into one of those cycles of revenge.

Of course traditional societies deal with the young and the elderly in ways that range from appalling to enlightened, with our own state societies probably falling somewhere in between. It is tempting to judge these practices based on our own experiences and ideals, and infanticide or abandoning the elderly are clearly practices we can condemn, but it is equally important to understand the environmental conditions that have led these societies to develop these practices.

Perhaps the most interesting concept introduced by Diamond is that of Constructive Paranoia. People in traditional societies live with so much risk during their lives that they sometimes take extreme caution in situations that might not appear to be that dangerous. You might camp under a dead tree because the odds that it will fall on you the particular night you happen to be sleeping under it is rather slim, but a New Guinean will never choose to camp under such a tree because he spends every night under a tree and he expects that the chance is fairly high that getting crushed by a dead tree will catch up to him. He won’t take the risk. Diamond discusses his own experiences with risk and danger and how he has adopted Constructive Paranoia in his own life.

Book Report 4/14/14

Book Report 4/14/14

Currently Reading (nonfiction): The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond

What can we learn from traditional societies? That is the subtitle and question at the heart of Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday. Diamond, who has given us plenty to think about in previous books (Guns, Germs and Steel, Collapse, The Third Chimpanzee), explores some of the different ways that traditional societies approach issues such as justice, child rearing and language, contrasting them with the general approach of the complex state societies most of the rest of us live in. The book promises a look at the diversity of human responses to typical situations by societies (bands, tribes and chiefdoms) that have a longer historical foundation than those state societies. Diamond seems intent on avoiding romanticizing these societies, warning that they will offer as many bad lessons as good. The first chapter offers a look at land use (and the level of exclusive use by several cultures); the definitions of friends, enemies and strangers; and the how trade is transacted between different tribes.

Currently Reading (fiction): Southern Haunts Part 2: Devils in the Darkness edited by Alexander S. Brown & Louise Myers

Although I am only three stories and a poem into this anthology of demon themed short stories, if the quality of the writing fails to improve I may regret the purchase. I get the idea that most of these writers understand the subject that they wish to write about, but that few of them have heard that most basic of writing advice “show, don’t tell.” Sure, I’m willing to accept a certain level of exposition in order to set the stage for a story, but these stories seem to be composed almost entirely of exposition, explaining things about the character’s past or the devils and demons plaguing them rather than constructing scenes where the characters act and interact with other elements of the story. A story titled The Battle of Vicksburg doesn’t even have any characters, but sets the stage for some kind of supernatural conflict between a demon and former Civil War Generals Lee and Grant. The narrative is told in the second person, not a particular problem except that there is no character attached to that perspective, so I’m not sure that it technically is a short story. But I’m still reading, with the hope that there are better stories in the remaining pages.

Book Report 4/7/14

Book Report 3/20/14
Book Report 2/27/14

Book Report 3/20/14

Completed Reading (nonfiction): Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff

Much like a book about the fall of Carthage (see Book Report 1/16/14), one about the decline of Detroit is not going to have much of a surprise ending. LeDuff continues to explore the deterioration of the city through a very personal lens, the impact of that decay on the lives of his family and people he has gotten to know in the city. I guess the title of the book is indicative of the story he wants to tell, but it might have been nice to balance the stories about promising young men gunned down in their prime with at least one example of personal achievement. LeDuff explores the history of his own family, how they came to Detroit and found success by hiding their racial identity. He explores the history of the city, and its own deep racial problems. (Fun Fact: In the 1920’s a KKK backed candidate won enough votes to be elected mayor of Detroit, but since it was a write-in campaign, 17,000 ballots were invalidated due to misspellings of the candidate’s name. Which proves that racists have always been morons.) There is a note of hope throughout LeDuff’s narrative, even as he tells one horrible story after another. It seems somewhere deep inside he still believes in his home town. The book ends with a visit to the place his sister died, a now overgrown field where he spies a deer feeding on the tall grass. He takes this a something of a hopeful sight, but I have to wonder how much hope there is in nature reclaiming the city from its failed human inhabitants. Detroit: An American Autopsy is a powerful, but often depressing book. A

Currently Reading (fiction): Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig

I have been following Chuck Wendig online for some time, reading his blog and tweets on a fairly regular basis. I have Kindle versions of his non-fiction 250 Things You Should Know About Writing and a fiction work titled Bait Dog. I tired of the list format before finishing 250 Things and have not yet had the opportunity to read Bait Dog, but recently purchased the novel Blackbirds during a special pricing promotion on Amazon. Blackbirds is about Miriam Black, a young woman with the strange ability to see the (future) death of any person that she touches. The book starts strong. Wendig is clearly in love with his style, his language and descriptions having a rather nasty edge to them. Nothing wrong with that, he uses language very effectively, but if you are easily offended you may wish to avoid his books. Miriam’s second major confrontation within the first few chapters of the book (a bar fight) has me wondering whether or not Wendig is picking these fights just to fill space and keep the action up. It’s as if he wrote “insert bar fight here” on his outline. I hope it has more relevance to the plot than that, though I doubt it. Still, an engaging start to what I hope will be an entertaining novel.

Book Report 2/27/14

Book Report 2/6/14
Book Report 1/30/14

Book Report 2/27/14

Completed Reading (fiction): The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Steig Larsson

Having viewed all of the films based on this series, there was little suspense with regard to the ultimate resolution of this novel. Of course in almost any novel it is a safe enough bet that the protagonist, while facing many obstacles and struggles, will ultimately win the day. (Unless, of course, that protagonist is named Stark and inhabits a novel written by George R.R. Martin.)  So it shouldn’t be much of a spoiler to reveal that Lisbeth Salander avoids both a prison sentence and confinement to a mental hospital. Still, even if one didn’t see this resolution coming based on the usual rules of fiction, the novel itself leaves little doubt as to the predicted outcome. The Section, a rogue cabal within the Swedish Secret Police, never really gets their act together with regards to their conspiracy against Salander. They want to silence her because of her father, a Soviet defector to Sweden who was handled by The Section in the 1980s and 90s. But for a group of spies they are notoriously ineffective. Salander’s ally, Mikael Blomkvist, and his associates always remain one step ahead of The Section, and that seriously undercuts the suspense. Slander’s lawyer makes short work of the prosecution and their star witness, the psychiatrist Teleborian, which leads to Salander’s acquittal and release. We are then subjected to an unnecessary sojourn to Gibraltar (sometimes telling is better than showing) before Salander finally gets her hands dirty in a confrontation that ties up the novel’s loose end. Nice to see her back in action, even if only for a small portion of the book. If you are well invested in the Millennium trilogy, and must know how the story ends, you probably won’t consider reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest a waste of time.

Currently Reading (nonfiction): Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff

Bodies buried in ice in abandoned buildings. Families members ravaged by drug and alcohol abuse. First responders struggling with inadequate equipment, punished for looting if they take abandoned property. Corrupt and incompetent politicians growing more corrupt and incompetent by the day. The deterioration of old Detroit proceeds apace.

Currently Reading (fiction): Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig

Book Report 2/6/14
Book Report 1/30/14
Book Report 1/16/14

Book Report 2/6/14

Currently Reading (fiction): The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Steig Larsson

I read through the resolution of Berger’s stalker subplot, which managed to involve Salander if not be directly related to her story. Again the hacker genius, with minimal resources and the help of her friend Plague, manages to do what no one else could, figure out who was stalking Berger and sending her all those nasty emails. The final resolution was rather dull. Nothing too original or enlightening here. And Salander’s skills with computers and information networks have a magical Deus Ex Machina quality that defies reality. We are told that she (or one of her compatriots) hacked into a computer and retrieved, or deleted or otherwise meddled with the data stored there, but the specifics of how this is done is rather vague. Of course we don’t really want to complicate an irrelevant subplot by adding exposition on the exact methods of the hack, but for the sake of reality these efforts might on occasion fail, or require more work and time than they appear to. And again, with this particular subplot, involving Salander does not make it relevant to the main plot. Sure the connection with Berger allowed her to warn Blomkvist about a secret meeting between the psychiatrist Teleborian and an intelligence operative, but that’s too weak a connection to justify padding such a long novel with a generally pointless subplot.

Currently Reading (nonfiction): Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff

LeDuff continues his examination of the physical, psychological and political decline of Detroit in a manner that remains very personal (for the author).  He rides along with on a fire truck through a city that many of the residents seem eager to burn down, observing firefighters who do their best to extinguish fires with dilapidated equipment and little support from the city’s leaders. He continues to examine the corruption of local elected officials, many who come off as cartoon characters. They are almost as incompetent at being corrupt as they are running the city. He observes a coffin being removed from a cemetery, because even the dead are moving out of the city and into the suburbs, something he calls ‘dead flight’. Yet somehow, even as the facts presented point only to inevitable doom, there is a tone of optimism in the narrative, as if both the author and the people he writes about believe that there is still hope for the city. Then again, you don’t complete an autopsy on something that still has a chance to live.

Book Report 1/30/14

Book Report 1/16/14

Book Report 1/9/14