The discussion from Tom and Jill that followed my posting about the Wright Brothers on December 17th led me to read James Tobin’s To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight
It’s good.
Writing this review reminds me again of the time in high school when I spent most of the day reading a book during various classes so I could give an oral book report on it in last period English — Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember. I can still see the smiling, smirking and disapproving faces of a whole classroom full of high school juniors who thought it was somehow hilarious (and/or a mortal sin) that I pulled this off.
“On-demand delivery” is all the rage now. I was just ahead of the times.
I hope your book review in high school was better than this one, or I wouldn’t exactly say you “pulled [it] off.”
Maybe I learned it from you, because I was always pulling off that sort of thing, too–book reports, papers, etc. I once had a biology teacher hold my research paper up in front of the class as a shining example of how an “A” paper couldn’t be done the night before, which is exactly when I had written it.
It’s not an academic strategy I’m proud of.
The Tobin book is a well-told version of the Wright story with an emphasis, as the sub-title explains, on the competition including Langley, the French and a team led by Alexander Graham Bell. It explains exactly what made the Wrights’ approach different from the others (they won their patent suits); and what made the Wrights themselves different. One can almost feel the drama, the excitement when the aeroplane was finally flown in front of French and American crowds in 1909.