Customer Reviews

The Flyers: In Search of Wilbur & Orville Wright

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Noah 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.

I happened on this book at a local shop just after it was released. Having read the superb biography of the Wrights, "The Bishops Boys" by Tom Crouch, I can recommend this book as an excellent companion piece. Noah Adams' narrative has an immediacy to it, and he brings the Wrights alive as only a storyteller can. As he travels around the country, and the world, tracing the footsteps of the Wright brothers and sister, offering observation and insight, Adams brings us face to face with their - and our - history. With the appproaching "centennial of flight", this would make a very appropriate book gift, especially for the holidays.

This is a very well-written and well-told story of the human side of the Wright brothers and their pioneering role in aviation. It's not intended as an in-depth biography but rather a first-person, experiential step back in time (from the perspective of today and the then-upcoming 100th anniversary of the first flight at Kitty Hawk) to explore what it would have been like to be with the Wright brothers as they developed their inventions and their subsequent aviation careers.

The author, Noah Adams, goes to all the important sites affiliated with the Wright brothers' development of controlled flight and their later quest for recognition and profit. He interweaves his impressions of the locations where the Wright brothers lived and worked with snippets from the private writings of their father and sister to paint an effective and intimate portrait of the relationships within the Wright family. His narrative conveys the excitement and novelty of the early days of powered flight that leaves the reader with a solid understanding of the Wright brothers' tremendous accomplishments. The wonderful photographs at the beginning of each chapter are used creatively not only to provide a visual reference but also to anchor the storyline in a particularly informative yet subtle manner.

I found this to be a highly readable, well-researched, and enjoyable book, and I would recommend it to anyone who would like a taste of the early days of aviation and the intimate life of its two most important pioneers. For those reading some of the reviews here on Amazon, the ones that are most critical seem to miss the point of this book and the first-person nature of its perspective.

Wilbur and Orville Wright from Dayton, Ohio translated their bicycle-shop experience into a winning stake in the quest for powered flight. Their names, and the name of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, have a high recognition quotient in popular culture. Author and NPR broadcast journalist Noah Adams took a year to research the Wrights' work and visit the scenes of their milestone achievements, and gave us a combination biography and road trip book in The Flyers: In Search of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

The Wrights' approach to flight was to perfect the art of gliding before adding power, rather than focusing first on the engine. They saw the need for flexing (or warping) the wings for lift and maneuverability, and from the start their gliders were flexed with rope controls on the wings. Most of their accomplishments built on known principles though in 1901 they produced enough data to show that a long-accepted lift coefficient was inaccurate. I'm not sure whether they were visionaries, but they were innovators and businessmen. They waged patent wars over their wing designs and presumably made a lot of money from their work, though this is not covered in enough detail in the book.

Some things work very well in "The Flyers." For example, extensive quotes from family correspondence illuminate the brothers' activities and achievements, as well as those of family members. The technical aspects of the flying machines are described fully enough to be interesting. The key locations are described vividly.The early contest-and-exhibition circuits provide enough material for a few more wonderful movies--those risk-taking "flyboys" with their white scarves sailing in the wind deserve another noisy flight or two.

Two aspects of the book were not so successful for me. For one thing, I found the author's pilgrimages less effective than the history itself. Any biographer would want to stand on the dunes or the prairies where historic events took place so matter-of-factly, but the stories of these visits sometimes confound the chronology and impede the flow of the history.

The other problem is the lack of information about the brothers' early life and no real insight into their determination to fly. What made them into the serious, successful, family-oriented bachelors they turned out to be? In fact, though their accomplishments are well-reported, Wilbur and Orville themselves are somehow obscured behind the facts. Maybe they were essentially unknowable as private individuals; they certainly didn't come fully to life for me.

In spite of these issues, "The Flyers" has a wealth of interesting material. It doesn't claim to be the definitive biography--and while I haven't read any other Wright biographies, I think this would be a valuable companion work to something more chronological and interpretive. If you only know a little about the early days of flying and want to know a little more, this book may be perfect for you. I listened to the unabridged audio and found it a good choice for that format.

Linda Bulger, 2009

I lived in Dayton, Ohio, for three years during the late 1960s. I appreciate the nostalgia and reverence Noah Adams captures in his description of Dayton and of the Wright Brothers' exploits.

I remember the huge bombers taking off from Wright-Pat airbase, their somber mission and the fear of nuclear war always a palpable emotion in those years.

Adams captures both the essence of the Wright family and its influence on the world. I never had a chance to see their Oakwood home, but Adams let me feel the ambiance each room in their house and the dynamics between the two brothers and their family.

The visitation of Adams to Kitty Hawk and to Hawthorne Hill accentuates the intensity of those first flights. The added photographs of these historic moments intensifies their importance.

What I would give to have been there in France or in New York harbor when that old-fashioned airplane swooped by.

Larry Rochelle, author of DUST DEVILS, SIREN SORCERY, GULF GHOST and BLUE ICE.

This is a great little book. You follow along as Adams revisits many of the places where the Wright Brothers went. Just like any such visitor, he revels in the little things he finds that match up with some bit of the legend, like finding a building where they stayed; or the hospital where Orville was laid up after the first fatal crash. He also finds evidence of the huge impact Wilbur made in France where he was hailed as a hero. Who'd have thought there was a "Wilbur Street" in France?

No, this is no substitute for those blow-by-blow accounts of each innovation, but it fills in the gaps and adds some chronolgy that others lack. For example, he mentions how Orville's crash happened while Wilbur was in Europe, and how long it had been since Orville had last flown.

This is a fine book, and if you've ever gone on your own trek to try and get a sense of history by "being there", you won't be able to put it down.

boring. Even if you're fascinated by the Wright brothers. That's because the author writes less about the Wrights (who are interesting) than about himself (unbelievably dull). Pretentious junk. Skip it.

The problem with Noah Adams's book is an inability to decide what it wants to be. A Wright Brothers biography? No. A personal memoir? Not really. A Wright Brothers Greatest Hits visit to places intimately connected with their lives? Not that either, although The Flyers certainly has some characteristics of all those three possibilities. While well-written, the book fails to capture the brothers, not really a surprising flaw since they are long dead, their contemporaries are long dead and the Brothers didn't leave much in the way of a written account of their lives. The characters who come most back to life here are their father Bishop Wright and, especially, their lovely and patient sister Katharine. And they breathe on the page precisely because Adams draws frequently and well from their journals and letters. Adams is also good when writing of the places the Wright Brothers flew, such as the Outer Banks of North Carolina and New York. Each chapter starts with a title page photograph and many of them are rare treasures, at least as evocative as Adams's text. One minor annoyance -- the Wrights were famously solitary and family-centered, so the frequent interludes where Adams imagines himself exchanging small talk and daily observations with the Wilbur and Orville ring jarringly untrue.

This biography on the Wrights is a confused mess. Adams tells the story by visitng locations where the Wrights made history, but during these travels we learn more about his modern day random encounters than what the Wrights actually did there. Adams goes on for pages about capturing moths, a boy and his heroic dog, and other such tales which have nothing to do with the Wrights.

This biography also neglects describe the Wrights childhood and what might have made them the brilliant engineers they became. The book really focuses on everything after the Kitty Hawk flight. This is its biggest strength in describing how they traveled the world to show everyone their flying machine, including moments of triumph and tragedy.

The book finds down by focussing on the Wrights' sisters love affair. I got the feeling that the author felt their needed to be a romance somewhere in the book, and since the Wrights were more focussed on machines than women that he needed to waste our time with this barely relevant affair.

Listened to part of this book on tape (did not read book). Quit after an hour because he talked about his own recent travel to WHERE the Wrights were born, buried etc. and not as much ABOUT the Wrights. His focus seemed more on his impression of places, and not enough details about the protagonists & why & how they experimented with flight. Had to stop when he described offering his tour guide a spoonful of his strawberry jam. Who cares about that? Tell the story of the Wright Bros!