The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

David McCullough just demonstrated how little I knew about these two important brothers and their unknown sister.  Almost everyone remembers that they made bikes and flew the first flight at a place called Kittyhawk.  And that is all most of us know.

But there was much more to their story than waking up and telling each other, lets build a flying machine.   They did research, they connected with the leading men in the small aviation world, and they did prototypes and gliders.

They not only built a plane, they also learned how to fly.  They used gliders to hone their skill and they build small scale wind tunnels to test ideas.  These men were engineers and scientists as well as the first pilots.

Then the big moment happens and the first reaction in the US was a yawn, but this did not discourage them.  They believed in what they were doing and even though they had to travel to France to get the encouragement they needed and some financial reward, they knew that eventually the US would discover and act on their work.

Their persistence with their own time and their own money to build this plane was amazing and well documented in a McCullough classic.  No write today does research better than this author and the writing is so clear and factual that you finish the book feeling like you know the subject.

Well organized and thorough, flight is the fourth character in this book, its early history and people like Langely who headed the Smithsonian and had lots of money and resources, but was secretive and did not share with the brothers and Octave Chanute, born in Paris, an American Civil Engineer, who did encourage and share his knowledge are part of the flight story.

Wilbur and Orville Wright almost come out as one character.  They were so close and stayed that way, unmarried except to their project, we start to see the subtle differences in the two dedicated men.

And ultimately the cast of characters will have the man they hired to run the shop and do their mechanical engineering as well as the sister who takes a prominent role after the flight.

The final important character is their father, the bishop, who is in the background of the story, yet is the key to the inspiration through a toy he gave the boys when they were young.

Great read and

A Nice Little Place on the North Side by George Will

I was disappointed.  George Will is a strong baseball fan and some of his writing is excellent, but this is low on the list.  As he says at the end he is gushing, but more than anything this story of Wrigley Field went in so many directions that it lost the most important direction - a narrative from beginning to end.

We learn about psychological and sociological studies, the text includes Shakespeare, Goethe, and quotes from Great Expectations and William Butler Yeats.

There are baseball references - a trivia distributed throughout text - which is fun, but too short to satisfy the baseball fan who wants to wallow in the suffering of cubs fans.

It is short and part of it are really enjoyable, but overall it is for those in love with the stadium.

River-Horse by William Least Heat-Moon.

Because I have walked around Lake Superior and taken the entire Mississippi River I really looked forward to this book. I did enjoy it, but I wanted more of the places, the scenery, the rivers and the lakes. 

It was a personal adventure and perhaps a quest so it focused on the passengers and the problems. It was fun and there were some real challenges that they surmounted.

All adventurers can relate to a crazy dream like this and the effort it took to boat from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Imagine - he went up the Erie Canal, he boated the length of the Ohio and the Missouri rivers and came out where Lewis and Clark met the Pacific Ocean.  It is quite a feat. 

For light enjoyable reading I recommend it.

The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle by Russell Miller

I have always been a fan of Sherlock and I knew of the antipathy of the author towards his star creation, so, of course, I have been curious about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and this book answered all the questions.

Unfortunately, it answered much more than I really wanted to know. It is exhaustive and exhausting.  Still it is a biography I am glad I read.  Doyle is a fascinating tragic figure.

He tries to live the adventurous life and has grandiose dreams.  Here is a man who creates Challenger in the Lost World, Sherlock in a grand series of mystery stories and yet he loves his creation Sir Nigel and assesses almost forgotten novels as his prize creation.

He travels to South Africa where he is Watson in the Boer War and throughout his life he travels the world.

In the end, this man who can create the intellectual detective - Holmes - who possesses no patience with the frills of mysticism, finds himself the world's foremost advocate of spiritualism.

He is deceived in a way that will mark the final decades of his life, ruin friendship, and lose him both money and respect.  He dies happy and rich so it does not destroy him, but he cannot see through the trickery.  This pits him against Houdini, the great magician, who wants to expose the fraud and from friendship they grow to competitive opposites like Holmes and Moriarity.

Animal Wise by Virginia Morell

For too long humans have sought to reinforce our egotistical place as elite among life. We have insisted only we can make and use tools, but now we find many species, genera, and families of life can use tools.

We thought only we had feelings, thoughts, language, but as the scientists in this book discover, all animals have thought and many have abilities that actually exceed ours.

To those who like the old ladder of life with us on the top rung it is time to change. It is time to acknowledge that life of all forms and shapes has the values and abilities that make them special.

True, we have a language that allows writing and preservation of facts and knowledge, but that is where our genetic development has accomplished the most.

The issue is that when we respect the fact that animals can speak, learn, communicate, feel emotions, feel pain we develop an empathy for them. Most important we develop a respect. And then we know that their loss is a loss for the planet and for us. 

Human treatment, like cleaning the air and the water is not a burden, it is what we should expect if we as a species have the highest order of thought - ethics. 

Each chapter is a different thread, each story from ants to fish to birds to apes to dogs is insightful, entertaining and educational.

Profiles in Folly by Alan Axelrod

What a history book!  Lets just get to it - what is the worst and dumbest decisions ever made, US, World,not the universe - yet.  Axelrod not only writes a book that is easy to read, it is a book that is hard to put down.  My God, what other dumb decision is there?  From Custer to Katrina, from Rasputin to George W Bush we are treated to thoughtful essays that provide us with a great opportunity to see when leadership failed us.

Enron to Edsel the book jumps from politics to economy.  The book looks at some of the worst presidents to some of the best, but it spares no rod when it sees the Gulf of Tonkin and the Dred Scott decisions.

This book is real and thought provoking history.  From "I am not a crook" to the racist refusal to use the African American Troops at Petersburg we are reminded that we do not live with the best decisions, we survive the worst.

The Old Ways

As a walking person I was drawn to Macfarlane's book, but I did not really understand that it was a walking tribute to Edward Thomas who was the writer that influenced Robert Frost and was the basis for the Two Paths Diverge verses.  

It is a book that is rich in references to paths, writing, walking, philosophy.  

These are the folk paths, the journeys by foot that have marked the earth for centuries and the landscape that is encountered when they are walked now.  

Some parts of the book drag and others are too short.  Depending upon your reference, each chapter has a different perspective and collectively they honor the basic experience of walking.. 

 It started out slowly and suddenly it was over.  How did that happen.  Maybe, like a walk, it takes time to get your stride, to feel the landscape and find the stories that are all around. 

A Spy Among Friends

I grew up on I Led Three Lives - a television series based on Herbert Philbrick. It was a series that my vague memory puts as a classic. In Wikipedia it describes the series: "It was loosely based on the life of Herbert Philbrick, a Boston advertising executive who infiltrated the U.S. Communist Party on behalf of the FBI in the 1940s." In this book we go back to that era and find the most notorious of all spies - Kim Philby double agent who single-handedly turned the western spy agents into a joke. A Russian agent, Philby almost became the head of British spies. 

Here is the ultimate of spying, almost a parody of the parody I SPY in Mad magazine. So sophisticated were our spies that we could not figure out when someone in our own agency was causing the people we supported to be caught, captured, and killed by the Soviets.

It has to be an embarrassment to the families of the leading spies in the US and Britain and it is a good lesson for everyone in this clandestine game.

It is a fascinating story and well written.

The Caning by Stephen Puleo

Drama is difficult when the results are known, but in this historic recounting of the famous caning by southern Brooks to northern Senator Sumner there is a tension that you look for in good novels.

Bloody Kansas, a country tired of the horrible institution called slavery and a south comfortable in the inconsistent application of whip, chain, and inhumanity of the institution meant that conflict was inevitable. 

Even religion could not expel or justify this blight on national history, but the results of one man - Representative Brooks - taking a cane to beat another man - Charles Sumner in the halls of congress seemed to be the keystone to the shift in the debate.

No longer was it the dance that Madison had caused around this albatross, but rather it was an open and flagrant conflict that could be embodied in the bloody and invalid Sumner. 

The time for genteel discussion and compromise was past. The caning represented so much more and the bloodshed in Kansas was beyond comprehension as the bullies of Missouri poored across the border.

Ruffians they were but much more, this was a flagrant violation of the right of a state to choose for itself and the emotions brought John Brown and his boys to righteous indignation and eye for an eye retribution.

All in all the act of caning made Lincoln possible and war inevitable. Following the tableau is fascinating and absorbing.