The Flyers: In Search of Wilbur and Orville Wright Review

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The Flyers: In Search of Wilbur and Orville Wright ReviewNoah Adams took a year off from NPR and went in search of the Wright Brothers. He sought out the threads of their story in locations from Dayton Ohio to Paris France, as well as deep inside the many long letters that Orville, Wilbur, their father Milton and their sister Kate shared over the years. The result is a fresh telling of the Wright story that is well worth reading.
Adams' book caught my eye because I have been on my own Wright Brothers quest the last two years, producing a documentary for The History Channel. In reading his book I discovered we had unknowingly crossed paths twice. Once in October 2002 on the dunes of Jockey's Ridge state park, a few miles south of Kitty Hawk, watching military pilots try their hand flying the Wright Brothers 1902 glider, and once at the annual air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Having done a substantial amount of research into the Wrights' story, I wondered if I would learn anything new in this book, and was delighted to find that I did. No other book that I've seen details Wilbur Wright's first encounter with alphabet soup at a hotel dining room in France in 1908, which is a wonderful moment. Other little known nuggets also come to light here. The Wrights' sense of humor, hidden from the world and saved only for family and close friends, is also write large on these pages, which helps us see past the starched suits and pinched faces and come face to face with the real men.
Other parts of the story that I was familiar with were told with caring and detail that made them seem brand new. One exquisitely sad chapter deals in detail with Will and Orv's sister Kate. She and Orville were as close as two people could be, and came to rely heavily on each other after Wilbur's death. But when Kate fell in love in her 50's with an old college friend, recently widowed, and decided to marry him, Orville cut her off. He didn't attend the wedding, he returned letters, and never spoke to her again before she died of pneumonia two years later. Adams tells the story through Kate's letters, and the pain is palpable.
But it is Adams' own explorations that what really set the book apart, as he visits the dirt racecourse in Le Mans where Wilbur Wright astonished the world with his first flight, charters a boat to Kitty Hawk the same way Wilbur Wright did, or examines the original glass negative of that famous picture of the first flight.
Listeners to NPR are familiar with Adams' folksy style. You meet the people he does, be they curators, taxi drivers, whoever. He occasionally stumbles, rambling on too long about a moth collector at Huffman Prairie, or a stunt pilot flying at Oshkosh. But he hits far more often than he misses. His observations and his musings, and his weaving of modern day people and happenings into the story make this book unique among the many Wright books that have come out this year. You can learn the history well you enjoy the ride. I highly recommend it.
One other note: I downloaded the audio version of this book, something I had never done before, and it worked quite well. I was going to burn it to CD, but it would have required multiple CDs, so I just listened to it off my laptop, which was great.The Flyers: In Search of Wilbur and Orville Wright Overview

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