The Wright Brothers

Title: The Wright Brothers

Author: David McCullough

Pages: 320

Genre: History, Biography

Grade: A

Synopsis: Orville and Wilbur Wright are known to the world as the inventors of powered flight.  To those of use living today, with airplanes, helicopters, drones and other flying devices all around that may not seem like such an amazing scientific achievement, but as it turns out, it required a substantial amount of original research, design, development, trial and error for the Wrights to accomplish this feat.  Orville and Wilbur Wright were extraordinary gifted geniuses and were able to devise solutions to all sorts of challenges that had stumped those who had tried to fly before them.

My Review: Another triumph by probably my favorite author, David McCullough.  He's quite old, and I'll be sad when he stops writing because he has a gift for bringing people, engineering feats, accomplishments and tragedies to life.  As is typical with his books, The Wright Brothers is based upon pages and pages of letters, journal entries and writings of journalists.  I was especially interested in this book as I started reading it while we were spending the week on the Outer Banks in North Carolina (just up the shore from Kitty Hawk, where the first flights took place) and I spent a few years growing up in Dayton, Ohio, best known for being the birthplace of the Wright Brothers.