THE FLYERS

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.