Book Review: "The Wright Brothes" by David McCullough

The Wright Brothers (2014)

Four Stars out of Five

David McCullough

David McCullough has developed a voice for the American people. Whether he is narrating a documentary for Ken Burns (The Civil War) or telling the life of an under-appreciated US president (Pulitzer prize winning books on Harry Truman in 1992 and John Adams in 2001), David McCullough has a voice and style that makes learning history an enjoyable experience. He also brings an historian’s eye and expertise to the job as well as the enthusiasm of someone who truly admires his subject and subject material. This English Literature Graduate-turned Historian is able to bring to the American people stories that illustrate the American psyche; often stories that lay hidden away from the public view, more so that other more popular topics: Adams instead of Jefferson, Truman instead of FDR, and now the Wright Brothers instead of (say) Steve Jobs.

In each of the books I list above, McCullough digs through the literature and brings to light many topics that I thought I already knew but didn’t (e.g. a much keener insight into Adams’ nature or Truman’s under-appreciated intellect), or in the case of the Wright Brothers, a much more informed opinion of what they did to develop the airplane. Like many contemporary observers of the Wright Brothers’ achievement I was overly influenced by the photographs of their early flights into believing it was a simple, almost intuitive thing they did. I was sure I could have done the same thing had I been born in the late 19^th century. I knew nothing of the Wright Brothers’ exhaustive observations of bird flight, their mechanical aptitude, their perseverance in the face of technical set-backs and public ridicule, or even and more to the point, the mathematical and engineering prowess that they (most especially the senior brother, Wilbur) brought to the project.

The Wright Brothers would not have seemed the most promising of team’s aiming to solve the problem of mechanically-driven heavier than air flight. They were in opposition to many leading American inventors (Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Langley, Octave Chanute) as well as to very enthusiastic efforts taking place in England, France and Germany. They lacked college educations, formal training in engineering or aeronautics of any kind. Their work record ranged from printing a local paper to building and selling bicycles. And yet, driven by Wilbur’s passionate desire to understand flight, they embarked on a lengthy study of birds, most particularly soaring birds. These careful and insightful observations led Wilbur to begin an analysis of flight that was often the work of genius. Drawing on literature he obtained from the Smithsonian and from interactions with Octave Chanute, Wilbur developed concepts and mathematics to explain his wing designs that were groundbreaking.

Wilbur and Orville travelled from their home in Dayton, Ohio to the Outer Banks of North Carolina in order to utilize the nearly constant winds and lack of prying eyes there. Both of these two needs go a long way to explaining the Wright Brothers success and frustrations in the early years of the 20^th century. The Kitty Hawk area of North Carolina in the year 1900 was only accessible by boat, but only just so. On his first trip to the region in September, 1900, Wilbur spent weeks trying to find someone who could pilot a boat to Kitty Hawk from the mainland, and then when he did find passage, he was very nearly killed in the transit. The Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills areas of the Outer Banks were to prove exactly what the brothers needed in terms of wind and isolation. They were able to read and learn from the efforts of others, and to incorporate their own ideas into wing design to create a series of gliders. They sometimes flew these gliders as kites, while on other occasions they flew them, sometimes setting records for distance. From their experience with the gliders, they eventually built the Wright Flyer I, a powered flyer; the flyer with which they accomplished first the feat of manned powered flight on December 17, 1903.

After their first successful series of flights with Flyer I, flights they had recorded with photography, they returned home to Dayton in order to advance their design such that their Flyers II and III did not require the high winds of Kitty Hawk. They were successful in these efforts, but then they began to encounter winds of a different sort. Much of the ensuing problems that the Wright Brothers dealt with had their origins in the Wright Brothers near pathological desire for secrecy and control over their invention. Because few had witnessed their successes, and because so many others, others well financed and educated in engineering had failed, the Wright Brothers were widely called frauds. Orville’s mental issues (never really defined in the book, but quite hard to ignore) and Wilbur’s often hostile attitude to strangers did not help their case. What did help their case was Wilbur’s native engineering skill and intellect, the brothers’ unflagging experimentation and practice, and in only a few cases, the faithful assistance of others. Octave Chanute was but the first of several French admirers of the Wright Brothers to lend his assistance.

When at last in 1908, Wilbur felt they had finished their engineering studies and their aerial practice, he arranged to demonstrate at Le Mans France just what he and Orville could do. Wilbur was to create and then break one flight record after another after moving to Pau France in 1909. Critics were turned to supporters, and the fiscal and critical reaction to the Brothers’ accomplishments finally began to turn their way. While Wilbur was accomplishing so much in France in 1908, Orville was to do the American demonstrations at Ft. Meyer, VA. After beginning his flights and setting several records, Orville suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure, the first experienced by the brothers. Orville very nearly lost his life; his passenger, in fact did lose his. Orville was to sink into a spiritual and physical depression that took years to recover from. His sister Kathrine hitherto having played a role in their lives by running the bicycle shop back in Dayton was now to play a much more up front role. In a sense the public image of the Wright Brothers changed dramatically once Katherine came into the public view.

In time, the Wright Brothers were awarded the undisputed title of inventors of manned mechanical flight and achieved financial security. Sadly for them, the other realty of American life now took center stage. Wilbur was for the last five years of his life to spend little time flying or doing engineering work, but instead spent it fighting with the Herring-Curtiss Company and others over patent infringement. He died at 45 from typhus. His sister was to die only a few years later from pneumonia. Orville would sell the Wright Brothers Company three years after Wilbur’s death in 1912, and while he lived to a reasonably ripe old age, he faded from the aeronautical scene at about the same time as his brother.

McCullough’s book on the Wright Brothers, their sister Kathrine and immediate family is not really a biography in the traditional sense. It is a relatively slim (compared to "Truman" and "Adams") and is far less an intellectual examination of a short time during America’s history. While this book does not stand with “Truman” or “Adams” for intellectual insight, it is still a marvelous examination of a part of American culture that many Americans praise themselves for: homegrown ingenuity, strength of character, and hard work. The Wright Brothers are perfect examples of all these traits. Like Washington as an icon for American integrity, Lincoln as one of American compassion and empathy, or FDR as an example of leadership, the Wright Brothers could well stand as the definition of the human (American or otherwise) passion to understand and to conquer a part of the physical world in which we live. This book is unlikely to win the Pulitzer Prize, but it is definitely one every American can enjoy, one which every American would benefit by reading.

Book Review: "Life After Life" by Kate Atkinson

Life After Life (2013)

2.5 Stars out of 5

Kate Atkinson

Who hasn’t spent some time daydreaming about how history might change if only Hitler (or fill in historical villain of choice) had not reach the Chancellorship of Germany? It is perhaps a pleasurable experience for daydreamers and writers of speculative fiction, but in the end doesn’t really add up to much. Kate Atkinson has taken this motif and blended it with a Buddhists’ eye towards the cyclic nature to life. Unfortunately, like a daydreamer, her overly long book on the subject also does not add up to much.

Atkinson spins a long series of tales on the lives of Ursula Todd. She is an English girl baby/child/adolescent/young woman/mother/assassin. She is all of these things not because she lives each stage of her life in a linear fashion likes the rest of us (birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, aged, death), but because once she dies, she is reborn as the same baby each time. And each time she has the opportunity to live her life somewhat differently than the time(s) she did before. She has only the vaguest of memories from her previous trips around the cycle of life, and so there is close to zero learning going on. She can’t for example decide in a subsequent life to choose a different door like the lady in the Lady and the Tiger tale, and thus not choose the door that conceals the tiger. She might well have some cloudy idea that the door on the left is scarier than the door in the middle, but no understanding as to why; such as failure to learn causes serious complications to the plot structure of the novel.

Instead Atkinson has chosen to explore in depth through Ursula’s various lives what life in the countryside of early to mid-twentieth century England was like. Her descriptions of a bucolic life prior to WWII for the relatively wealthy Todd family are only modestly interesting, though they seem to be key comparative aspects to the story Atkinson really wants to tell. And that story is the one of life during wartime, the life for the civilians of London living under the German blitz. To her credit, she also explores via one of Ursula’s lives the life for the German civilians in Berlin during the final days of the war where the dreadful experiences of the English in the first part of the war are now visited in even more dreadful fashion upon the lives of the German citizenry. In terms of content, the best part of “Life After Life” is the brutal depiction of the suffering experienced by the average non-soldier in both countries. It may not be instructive on a deep level about human understanding and misery, but it certainly has an impact on the reader.

Ursula is born one snowy night in 1910 to her mother Sylvie. Sometimes Ursula dies at birth, sometimes her mother intervenes to save her, sometimes a doctor. The midwife that was to be there is held up by the storm, and spends each of Ursula’s lives drinking in a pub far from Ursula’s birthplace and home, Fox Corner. Ursula grows to childhood, and sometimes she dies in the ocean or by some other mischance. Sometimes Ursula grows to sixteen only to be diverted down paths leading to rape, childbirth and a life lost to such consequences, or in other lives she meets and falls in love with caring men who help her reach her later years. Sometimes she is saved after a fashion by her wild-at-heart Aunt Izzie (a stark counterweight to her mother, snobbish, self-centered Sylvie). Most of the book describes her lives during WWII when she either lives in London during the Blitz or in Berlin during its eventual destruction. Sometimes she is dying during a German bombardment, while other times she is busy saving the people in the very same bombed building she died during a previous life. All of these lives eventually provide sufficient learning, no matter how vague or cloudy such that at some point in all these trips around the circle of her curious life, she learns to plot to kill Hitler. She has her chance; she takes it; and what?

Yes, Atkinson is very skilled at telling a story in a fashion that is so fractured, she herself has described it a fractal. I would rush to agree with her. It is a complex picture she has created. It is not complex due to its content; it is complex in the manner of looking out a frost covered window at some simple scene in your backyard. The crystalline ice molecules refract and break up the image coming from the backyard. You as the viewer can see the image, not clearly but with an appreciation of the distorted beauty of the simple scene. Atkinson has a more important and complex tale to tell: war-induced misery in contrast to the gentle lives lived during peacetime. This is a good theme, but a story so lacking in plot, also nearly completely lacking in genuine character development that it leaves the reader with little more than the opportunity to enjoy the fractal view of their backyard. It’s pretty, but so what? I readily agree with other critics that to do what Atkinson has done with respect to telling a story in such a fashion requires great skill and verve. But the skillful telling of a story is not enough for me, the story must needs (to quote Sylvie) have content of some value, too.

If you like to read short vignettes of people’s lives as they experience the various possible experiences during peacetime or wartime, then perhaps this book is for you. It is artfully written with such a literary objective in mind. However, if you would like to explore the philosophical concept of a life re-lived, or the emotional consequences of certain paths taken in life that in hindsight provide an opportunity to learn, then this is not your book. I cannot understand the idea of randomly living the various paths that any life might take without the opportunity for anyone, the fictional, magical character living these lives (or the reader vicariously living them) to learn anything. Without plot or character development, the reader is left with short, seemingly pointless scenes that truly lead nowhere. A skillfully constructed novel in terms of creating the various pieces of the oft-mentioned fractal that build a picture of life in wartime, but no deeper meaning than that of a single picture from a battlefield. It can have an impact, just like photograph of a car accident, but in this book's case, there is so very little to be learned or felt.

Movie Review: "The Babadook"

The Babadook (2014)

Four and half Stars out of Five

Not Rated

Amelia Vanek: Essie Davis

Samuel Vanek: Noah Wiseman

Claire: Hayley McElhinney

Writer/Director: Jennifer Kent

Music: Jed Kurzel

Cinematography: Radek Ladczuk

One of my favorite kinds of movies is the type that teases the audience with its true genre. Is the story a horror movie, is it a psychological thriller, or is it a combination. Writer/director Jennifer Kent brings her Australian entry to this mind game with “The Babadook” (rhymes with look). Because of the intermingling of genre in “The Babadook”, this movie can be enjoyed by fans of either movie type, but it is in my opinion a very powerful tale of the difficulties faced by a single parent overwhelmed by grief and solely held parental responsibilities.

The story was filmed in Adelaide Australia, but most definitely could be placed almost anywhere in the world. Amelia (Essie Davis) is the mother of six-year old Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Her husband Oskar died in a horrible car accident as he drove the expectant Amelia to the hospital. She has had as a consequence been forced to raise Samuel by herself, and the strain on them both is beginning to take a toll. Samuel repeatedly acts out at school, oftentimes violently. He is as a consequence expelled from school, forcing Amelia to find daycare and school alternatives for him. She in the meanwhile labors away at a nursing home as a medical assistant. She lacks both the fiscal and physical means to raise Samuel. Into this fraught picture, Samuel begins to be unable to sleep. He wakes screaming each night that there is a monster beneath his bed or in the closet. Amelia is shown initially calming him, but soon her own lack of sleep takes a further toll on her already strained resources.

Having set the above scene in what is essentially a two part-story, writer/director Kent has created a tableau that strongly suggests the difficulties faced by many single parents; the emotional and financial strains that can tear apart such families. She heightens the situation by having the Samuel character display what seems to be characteristics of a psychologically unhinged child. These effects are played out by the best performance by a child actor in the form of Noah Wiseman as Samuel that I have seen since Anna Paquin co-starred as Flora McGrath in “The Piano” (1993). In fact, all other comments aside, “The Babadook” is worth seeing for young Wiseman’s performance alone. He is able to channel a terrified behavior that seems almost demonic in the first part of the movie and once his fear subsides can alternate to the loving child that lives within. That loving child shows up full time in the second part of “The Babadook”, and this is a key feature of Kent’s storytelling. The protective/sane mother in part one desperately needs the love and protective spirit of her child in part two of the story.

The movie segues into part two when one of the familiar tropes of horror movies makes it entrance: a blood red book is found by Samuel on the bookshelf. The mother knows nothing of it; how did it get there, no one knows. They read the book together. It is a pop-up book that becomes increasingly alarming to Amelia the further into the book they read. Samuel now has a name for his fears, the book’s (and the movie’s title), The Babadook. The movie gets a little predictable for a while at this point: Samuel’s behavior worsens, Amelia feels the book is the focus of his fears (rather than the life they lead), she tears up the book, she seeks help from a skeptical sister and police department, and voila the book re-appears, repaired. However, these clichés aside, this is where Kent builds some subtlety into the story.

When she approaches the police and tells them of the re-appearance of the repaired book, they ask to see it. She must inform them that she has burnt it, and worse her hands have something that may be glue on them. Did she actually repair the book herself? Is she in fact coming unhinged by the pressures in her life and has found the Babadook in whatever form (i.e. actual monster or someone stalking her and Samuel) as a convenient scapegoat for her troubles. Is in fact, the Babdook, her grief come alive, not in real, monstrous form, not even in a metaphorical form, but actually in the form of a woman suffering from delusions? When she later sees the Babadook on her ceiling or when he (using another horror film trope) enters her via her mouth, and then sees her deceased husband when she stares at the Babadook, what other rational explanation can there be but that she grieves still? Near the end of the movie, the lines between whether her grief in the form of the Babadook can be seen by her alone or maybe by Samuel, too become blurred. Near the movie’s end and after Samuel’s loving touch to her cheek allows her to vomit up a black inky like substance, Samuel also tells her the Babadook will never leave. She must instead learn to live with it; and now we really see the meaning behind the Babadook. Her problem and thus Samuel’s is she must learn to live with the grief she feels for Oskar’s death. It won’t go away, things will never be as they were, but she can learn to cope. The movie provides an odd little horror movie antidote to her problems. But no, the real antidote is that Amelia has learned to live with her tragic loss, and as such has actually learned how to provide a life with hope for her son.

This movie is not a profoundly deep one, but it does give some good life lessons on dealing with grief. Kent has cleverly colored her tale in the drapery of a horror film, and she does a good job doing so. The artwork of the Babadook book is clever in its use of color and design. The rhymes within are artful and well suited to the horror movie genre. Noah Wiseman’s performance as a tormented child is so amazing, one completely forgets he is a six year old acting a role, and the viewer becomes quite submerged in his performance. However, the brilliance of this movie is the use by Kent in telling a human story about grief, about raising children alone, and telling it in a style that can be enjoyed on multiple levels. An excellent movie that can be enjoyed by anyone inured to the horror movie genre, and interested in tales about the human condition.

Movie Review: Nightcrawler

Nightcrawler (2014)

Four Stars out of Five

R

Louis Bloom: Jake Gyllenhaal

Joe Loder: Bill Paxton

Nina Romina: Rene Russo

Rick: Riz Ahmed

Writer/Director: Dan Gilroy

Music: James Newton Howard

Cinematography: Robert Elswit

So many people have commented on the role that televised news broadcasts play in shaping American opinions that it seems almost pointless to join the crowd. And yet, coming from the Left as I do, I cannot watch Fox News for even ten minutes without becoming enraged. No doubt, many from the right feel similarly with respect to MSNBC or other non-Fox aligned stations. The media seems very much like a beast out of control as it twists or even invents the truth in order to sell their commercial time-slots or worse, to make a political point. One could be forgiven for wondering where the practice of such blatant misrepresentation originates. Writer/director Dan Gilroy offers some clues in his debut as director in “Nightcrawler”.

“Nightcrawler” tells the tale of a small time thief, Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) that makes the transition to stringer for a local Los Angles television news station. The irony of showing Louis’ origins as a petty thief prior to him joining a news team’s effort seems to be quite intentional. The movie opens by showing Louis in the act of stealing metal from a railroad yard and then beating and taking a wristwatch from the security guard that catches him in that yard. Louis takes his stolen metal to a junk yard to sell and to seek employment. To underline how low in the social strata Louis lives and how hypocritical a world he lives in, Louis is denied a job by the junk yard owner because that paragon of morality would not hire a thief – no, he’ll buy stolen goods from one, but he wouldn’t hire one.

Louis moves out into the night in his Toyota Tercel and first observes a freeway car accident, and then a freelance photographer, Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) filming the scene. Louis is inspired! He steals an expensive touring bicycle and then trades it in at a pawn shop for a camcorder and police scanner. Louis has also traded his life of crime for the morally ambiguous life of feeding off the misery of others via his camera and the American TV viewer’s lust for vicariously living through another’s moments of pain. Of course, Louis needs a pimp for his filmed after effects of murders/home break-ins/car accidents/bloody etc. after bloody etc. He finds one in Nina Romnia (Rene Russo), the morning news director at KWLA. That Louis becomes successful at his new trade should come as no surprise. What better training for the carefully framed versions of the news than the life of a metal thief? Writer Dan Gilroy makes both points abundantly clear as Louis trades up from the Tercel to a bright red, seriously fast Dodge Challenger, and even has Louis comment on how he is learning to better frame his shots; he makes the last point by having Louis alter an accident scene by moving the dead body in a fatal accident to give him that better camera angle.

Unsurprisingly, the movie is often painful to watch for its portrayal of human indifference. Gyllenhaal’s performance of the sociopathic Louis is stunning. After losing twenty pounds to play the role, and filming virtually the entire film in the LA night, Louis’ pale and emaciated skin at times takes on the aura of a vampire; again, the sense of a leech or bat feeding off the blood of others. Gyllenhaal also adopts a stilted, nearly alien-sounding speech pattern to again underline his very tangential relationship to the human race. Gyllenhaal’s performance is far from that of his portrayal the gay cowboy Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain (2005). His role as Louis Bloom instead compares favorably and is very reminiscent of Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976). Louis may not take a gun as Travis did to commit his mayhem, but Louis does hold back evidence to prompt an explosion of violence in order to film it. He makes Nina happy in doing so, and even gets her to go so far as to actually play the role of hooker to his John in order to get even more of the film/drug he is selling.

America in 2015 is awash with angry people. People who don’t feel any longer that America stands for what they grew up believing it once did: honesty, integrity, a sense of right and wrong that was impeachable. Is it any wonder that people feel this way when TV news programs either continue to utilize the motto “if it bleeds, it leads”, or perhaps have simply moved on to the role of political hacks; saying whatever they think will advance their party’s political position? What a choice to make, the prostitution of violence or political pandering. Where does America’s soul reside in 2015? It certainly does not reside within the corridors of America’s commercial news rooms. Was “Nightcrawler” aimed directly at this point, at the hollow heart of news reporting as practiced in the early 21^st century or was it simply an exploration of one man’s hollow heart in the form of Louis Bloom? Perhaps it was the latter, but the analogy to a bigger, bleaker picture is there for all to see, maybe even one, at which to despair.