Pleasant and unchallenging.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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