The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

I have enjoyed a couple of other of historian David McCullough's books, and think he is a good story teller. This biography, which is not just about Wilbur and Orville, but also about the family that nurtured them and the time in which they lived, is fascinating when considering the components in the story that led to their ultimate success. It starts with their parents. Susan Wright was the daughter of a carriage maker. Growing up in her father’s workshop she had learned to design and build things. It was she who taught the boys to notice how things worked, how to draw out plans for things before building them, and how to use tools. She taught them about wind resistance when they were designing and building a sled together. Their father encouraged them to explore as well. Another thing that makes this book interesting is the way it illustrates how one project or invention led to another. First it was building a sled. Then they built a rudder to steer it. When the snow melted they built a wagon using wheels from discarded tricycles. Next they built and flew kites. Next, a chair for their mother. When it became Will’s job to fold copies of the newspaper their father edited and their church published, they invented a machine to fold the newspapers. Next was a toy helicopter, then a printing press. Since a printing press is useless without something to print they began a newspaper, The West Side Tatler. They sold advertising and saved all their profits. Then they needed bicycles to deliver the papers, so they built them out of discarded bicycle parts. They became more interested in building bicycles than writing and selling newspapers so they opened a bicycle shop. You can see where this is going. It’s a good lesson for us mothers on how children’s interests, when nurtured in the right kind of environment and with the guidance and encouragement of an understanding parent, can lead those children into successful careers. I love the way this book shows that this invention of an airplane, which changed the world and the future of everyone in it, was something that grew out of the skills and interests and habits learned within the context of their family. The author does not explore the question of whether of not the brothers were neurotypical, but I suspect at least Wilbur was not--and the importance of that for fostering innovation now and in the future.

Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick

Ok, first off, if you are looking for a book about Elvis the man, you are not going to be happy with this. While it is densely researched, it ends in the late 1950's--it really is about how it all got started . It is based on hundreds of interviews and nearly a decade of research, it traces the evolution not just of the man but of the music and of the culture he left utterly transformed, creating a completely fresh portrait of Elvis and his world. This volume tracks the first twenty-four years of Elvis’ life, covering his childhood, the stunning first recordings at Sun Records (“That’s All Right,” “Mystery Train”), and the early RCA hits (“Heartbreak Hotel,” “Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel”). There’s more to this book than Elvis. It’s also the story of the American music industry in the 1950s. There is alot about how music was made and marketed at that time, and how rock n roll changed it. It wasn’t just about the sound but about how the music was actually sold. For example, how going on near-constant tour to small music venues was considered the best way to market yourself. The chapters about how Elvis’s manager, the Colonel, got him onto television and how television really started to change the music industry were fascinating. I heard and read a lot of the very bad things about the Colonel. This book really brought to light the why. The Colonel may have taken a much larger percent (25%) than was usual (10%), but he also had a great business mind and really got things done. It was the Colonel who got Elvis on television and in the movies. I’d always thought the Colonel pushed Elvis into the movies but this book showed from its extensive interviews that Elvis himself was quite interested in being like James Dean. The relationship, at least at the beginning, was a lot more give and take, and then inevitably it deteriorated, as did they.

Marty Supreme (2025)

On the surface this film, nominated in 9 categories for an Academy Award in 2026, including best casting, tells the story of a gifted but impoverished table tennis hustler in 1950s New York, who wants nothing more than to leave his parent’s shoe shop behind to showcase his ping-pong skills on the world stage. Played at full throttle by Timothée Chalamet, Marty Mauser is a motormouth, sharp in both wits and tongue. He’s selfish, manipulative, and not particularly nice to women, but boy can he smack a ball over a netted table. In fact, there are really no likable characters in this movie--while I can tolerate that for the greater good of the message, that too is lacking here. So, Marty goes to London for the British championship after cobbling together enough cash, where he ends up playing the world’s best, Koto Endo (played by the real-life player Koto Kawaguchi) from Japan. It goes badly, so Marty returns to America, determined to have another stab at glory, all the while shunning anything that looks like real work or responsibility. To do that, he just needs to raise more money. In the meantime, he impregnates his former flame, who happens to also be married to another man, seduces and exploits a sad, faded movie star, and lets down his best friend as he begs, borrows and steals his way back to the Big Leagues. The antics that he goes through to get to Japan for another chance are the core of the movie, and only at the end do we see where he begins to have a chance to make it big. The character Marty Mauser is loosely based on the real-life ping-pong hustler Marty Reisman—a fascinating, colorful and complex man. He died in 2012 at 82 years old of lung and heart complications and at one point was the champion of the world. Chalomee as Marty is believable if unlikable and stands a shot at Best Actor, but really, he should have won last year for the way he completely inhabited the character of Bob Dylan, and not for this.

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

This is comprehensive, meaning that it is long and could have used to be edited down quite a bit, pulling some material out and footnoted, so that it would be reduced to 1/2 the size, or equal parts book and notes. There is too much, and a lot of repetition. That said, you will not find more facts about Twain anywhere, I hazard to guess. Samuel Langhorne Clemens arrived with Halley’s Comet on November 30, 1835 in Hannibal, Missouri. He was the 6th child in a family that dreamed big. His best remembered books are set in the neighborhood of his childhood, but he traveled first the country and then the world, starting at an early age. In his lifetime, Mark Twain was the greatest literary celebrity in the world. In the US, he hobnobbed with presidents; on his many travels, he would dine privately with the German kaiser, the Austrian emperor, or the Prince of Wales. When he was in debt and unable to afford his sprawling mansion in Hartford, CT he inexplicably could live in hotels across Europe as an "economizing effort". He was famous and lived large. He was the bracing, irreverently humorous voice of America. He edited and published Grant's hugely autobiography, but was generally a failed businessman. He had a successful marriage, but a disturbing obsession with young girls. He spoke openly of equality for blacks and was anti-slavery even before the Civil War yet fought briefly for the Confederacy and has some cringe-worthy writing with racist stereotypes. He was complicated that way and Chernow doesn't do a lot to untangle that, despite this heroic effort.

Reagan by Max Boot

Yes, there are a lot of books about Reagan out there. I haven't read any of them but there are quite a few to choose from. Why did I choose this one? It was one of the 5 best Non-Fiction books names by the New York Times in 2024, and while I have had little interest in reading more about Reagan--he was governor when I was growing up in California and even as a child growing up in a Republican household, I could tell I didn't agree with his politics and didn't trust him. Then there is the timing. We are seeing the unwinding of American ideals that maybe didn't start with Reagan, but were at least propelled forward in a big way by him as president. The author was a Republican up to around about the Trump era where he broke away, but he was a fan of Reagan--which doesn't mean this lacks criticism, it has plenty of it, but it is an even handed biography, well researched and well written and exploring the facets of who Reagan was--he was so incapable of introspection, so emotionally withdrawn that he remained unknowable to everyone but possibly his second wife Nancy. His political priorities were shaped by things that happened to him in a way that lacked ideology, and he left the running of the government to those loyal to him. A pair of Trump’s eventual fixers lurked on the fringes of Reagan’s first presidential campaign: Roy Cohn and Roger Stone arranged for an endorsement that enabled Reagan to win the usually left-leaning state of New York. But the candidate himself always denied knowledge of such deals, and when Boot catches Reagan twisting the facts – for instance by reminiscing about his military valor during a war that he actually spent in Hollywood – he treats him as a self-deceived fabulist, not a liar. Well, to me they are both liars but one is a better story teller.

Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux

I read a review of his book before putting it on my library requests, and was intrigued that the author was contending that Gauguin was a more complicated man than he is remembered for. She opens with the discovery of 4 of his teeth in the cistern where he lived in Tahiti, and that they do not reveal treatment for syphilis that were typical at the time he lived and died. He has been remembered as both a pedophile and a spreader of disease in the typical colonial fashion, but that on closer investigation it is true that he was bonded to two different girls, both of whom were 13 at the time their relationship began, which was the age of consent in Tahiti at the time and the relationships were blessed by the girls families--again, in compliance with the standards of the time. Then she later delineates his role in protecting the rights of Tahitians against the predatory practices of colonial Frenchmen, which is well documented in the book, as well as why that would have been the case based on his upbringing and his other stances on record. This is an all inclusive rendition of Gauguin's life, which is fascinating and definitely changed my ill informed view of him that I had before reading the book. He did not start off as an artist, but once he went that way, he crossed paths with Vincent and Theo Van Gogh, who liked him personally and found his work as an artist to be quite impressive. He he had modest success while he was alive, and his collaborative relationship with the Van Goghs helped both artists develop. I would definitely recommend this--it is well written, well researched, and peppered with lots of reproductions of Gauguin's work--that are both high quality and placed where she is talking about the painting rather than in a separate section disconnected from the discussion, which I really liked.

Einstein: His Life and The Universe by Walter Isaacson

I admit, tackling the life and science of Albert Einstein is a gargantuan undertaking. Conveying the magnitude of Einstein’s scientific achievements is tough enough, but that’s just the start. His geopolitics, faith, cultural impact, philosophy of science, amorous affairs, powers of abstraction and superstar reputation are all part of this subject. While the science was hard for me to follow completely and a lot of the personal details were less than fully divulged, overall I would say this is a satisfactory biography, elevated in my rating based on the degree of difficulty in handing the subject matter. The book is heavy on the science, maybe 1/3 of the 700+ pages detail Einstein's life as a scientist and what he contributed to our understanding of how the universe works. If you are interested only in the personal side, I would suggest a different source. The fascinating thing for me was how much what he discovered came from him alone, and came about mostly through thinking it through rather than pouring over the math or grueling laboratory experiments. He was a force to be reckoned with, who was not 100% correct, but whose papers propelled his field forward almost at the speed of light. I wondered how a biographer could have such a knowledge of the science, and found that he leaned heavily on physicist Brian Greene in explicating the series of revelations Einstein brought forth in his wonder year, 1905, and the subsequent problems with quantum theory and uncertainty that would bedevil him. He was at the time working in the patent office in Switzerland, a job that provided him with enough income to live on and enough time to think. The personal aspects of Einstein's life are less interesting to me--he was a flirt, chronically unfaithful, twice married, and an inconstant parent. He was charming and unpredictable socially, at least as portrayed here. His political views shifted across his lifetime, and are also of little interest to me, but Isaacson does a good job of following them and Einstein shifted from a pacifist to a supporter of the war against Hitler and Nazis. Overall I would recommend this, although it takes some time and energy to get through.

Passage To Power by Robert Caro

The author of this volume, the fourth in his opus on the life and times of Lyndon Johnson, is long winded. The book opens in the final years of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, with Johnson contemplating a presidential run. It chugs through the grand detour of John F. Kennedy's reign, with LBJ sulking on the sidelines. And it ends in the first weeks of Johnson's presidency, which has been thrust upon him by JFK's assassination. Although these are, for Johnson, years of relative inaction, Caro infuses his pages with suspense, pathos, bitter rivalry and historic import — with Robert F. Kennedy in particular emerging as a nearly co-equal, second lead in the psychodrama, always looming offstage and threatening frequently to steal the spotlight from his arch rival. LBJ comes across by turns as insecure, canny, bighearted, self-defeating, petty, brilliant, cruel and, as ever, domineering. In the opening pages, he longingly eyes the presidency but, psychologically paralyzed, can’t bring himself to declare his candidacy or enter even a few primaries. Instead, he rages at the upstart Kennedy, who shows unforeseen proficiency in the old game of locking down governors and state Democratic Party leaders for the convention and in the new game of winning over the masses via television. He is a sore loser, a slighted VP, and about at his wits end when one day in Dallas it all changes course. Rising to the immense challenges before him, he guides the country with a strong hand through the dark days of November using Kennedy’s martyrdom to realize his slain predecessor’s unfulfilled agenda, although not without exacerbating already-miserable relations with Robert Kennedy (who comes off badly here--like father like son unfortunately). I was not left wanting more--I picked this up because it was on the New York Times 100 Best Books of the Twenty First Century, and it was more than enough for me, but it was also well worth reading, especially in light of what is happening in 2025.

A Passionate Mind In Relentless Pursuit by Noliwe Rooks

This is a time limited biography of a woman I had never heard of who had tremendous influence in her time. Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) was her parents’ 15th child and the first one born free. She fought for civil rights during the grim period between the end of Reconstruction and the post–World War II Civil Rights Movement. She founded schools, with an emphasis on educating Black girls, and she raised money to pay poll taxes and offered instruction on how to pass literacy tests for Black Americans trying to vote in the Jim Crow South. She served in the leadership of numerous civil rights and mutual aid organizations, from the NAACP to the National Council of Negro Women, and she advocated for the Black community as an adviser to three presidents. How did she do it? This is yet another example of what Eleanor Roosevelt did to lift up both African Americans as well as women in her time. In the early winter of 1938, Eleanor Roosevelt took a stand when she followed her friend, Mary McLeod Bethune into the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and sat beside Bethune, defying the racist Public Safety Commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama. That’s an account that’s easy to find anywhere, and it’s thrilling, but the story misses something: at one point, the conference’s organizer asked for “Mary” to come up to the platform. Bethune drew herself up and told the organizer “My name is Mrs. Bethune.” She heard the disrespect and she corrected it. The author identifies this as a personal work for her--she states that her grandparents knew Bethune and, in doing research for this book, her understanding of Bethune was totally changed. Bethune was more than an activist — she was also a dream maker and “the first lady of Black America.” This is a short read, but fascinating and again, if you didn't already love Eleanor Roosevelt, this will add on to the pile of miracles she performed.

Night Flyer by Tiya Miles

This is subtitled: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. Harriet Tubman is one of the ten most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill (Andrew Jackson finally getting his comeuppance, the very antithesis of an American hero replaced by a woman born a slave). Tubman, who was indeed born into slavery as Araminta “Minty” Ross in Maryland, suffered a traumatic brain injury at the age of 12 or 13 at the hands of an overseer, which resulted in what sounds like a form of temporal lobe epilepsy. The injury may explain the dreams and visions she later experienced that, along with the sale of her sisters, were motivating factors for her later actions as a woman guided by God to bring her people to freedom. She changed her name upon marrying, at approximately 22 to a free Black man named John Tubman, taking his last name, and her mother’s first name, Harriet. Thus, Minty Ross, the slave, became Harriet Tubman the liberator. She was small, disabled, but a gifted outdoorswoman who was fearless. Harriet is credited with multiple round-trips along the underground railroad, conducting approximately 70 enslaved people to freedom, starting with family and friends, but her mission expanded, and she often talked about being guided and that she received messages about how and where to go to rescue people. During the Civil War, itself, she also functioned as a military scout and spy, and she proved essential in a June 1863 raid into Confederate territory that freed nearly 750 slaves. Even with the end of the war and slavery, she carried on her mission for God, managing a boarding house and assisted living center in her home in the north. Hers is an inspirational story and this version is a wonder to read.

The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz

I had never heard of Frantz Fanon, who died of leukemia at the young age of 36, prior to reading this book. He was born on Martinique in 1925 and while he hated that his island was being governed by white men in Paris, he bought into the French ideology of liberty and equality. Educated and speaking better French than the French themselves, he fought for France against the Nazis and stayed in Paris after the war to make a life, marrying a white French woman. But while studying medicine in Lyon, he grasped that despite France's lip service to colorblind equality, he would inescapably be seen there not as an individual but as a Black man. And he opposed the idea of identifying by race. So he to moved to Algeria to run a clinic in 1953, and found himself joining forces with its National Liberation Front, or FLN, which was fighting to win Algeria's independence from France in a brutal struggle. He wasn't Algerian and couldn't speak Arabic, so he was never a leader or fighter. A brilliant sympathizer, he became a ruthlessly passionate advocate for the cause outside Algeria. This experience would lead Fanon to write his most famous work, "The Wretched Of The Earth," a poetically messianic volume whose publication has been called a historical event. His legacy is remembered to be that of a bloody revolutionary, but he also tried to explain why that is inevitably seen as the only solution to racist oppression. Ever since it first appeared in 1961, Fanon's book has inspired everyone from Latin American guerrillas and African revolutionaries to Palestinian militants and the Black Panthers. It's best known for its opening chapter, which champions the power of violence to liberate the oppressed both politically and psychologically--it is unpalatable, to be sure, but also may be impossible. Cultures do not shift seismically, but his work related to understanding the downtrodden has also been buried with him. I did not realize that the war for independence in Algeria was revving up at the same time that it was in Vietnam, and would love to read something equally cynical to this about the unraveling of colonial France.

President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by CW Goodyear

So, why Garfield, you ask? Before read this I would have agreed with you. I did venture to his homestead once when I was in Ohio (which is the breeding ground of more Presidents than any other state than Virginia, and let's face it, they got a huge head start with the whole pre-and post Revolutionary War cabal, making a name for themselves with the Declaration of Independence and Constitution business). It’s not immediately evident why anyone should write an ambitious, thorough, supremely researched biography of James Garfield, the first such effort in nearly a half-century. The nation’s 20th president served just 200 days in office, 80 of which he spent dying after being shot by an assassin’s bullet, and seemingly the most interesting part of that abbreviated tenure — the assassination. Wrong! Garfield lived it all — starting work as a teenager on an Ohio canal towpath, traveling across a region whose canals his father helped build, teaching and ministering on the frontiers of the Western Reserve, then rising in local politics through the turbulent prewar years as the country was wrenched apart by slavery, ascending to fame in Civil War combat as one of the few Union officers who showed any ambition and aggression in the early years (bravery mixed with equal parts luck on the battlefield), and then catapulting himself into Congress at 31. From his first election as head of the debating society at Williams College to a then-long tenure of 17 years in the House and finally on to the White House, Garfield never lost an election. And, in advance of him becoming president himself, he presided over preventing Southern Dixiecrats from stealing the election from Rutherford Hayes from succeeding. He was the original Black Lives Matter guy. He saw the dangers for ex-slaves in the post-Civil War South, and while he lost many of these battles, he was unwaveringly anti-slavery before the war, and a supporter of full rights for black citizens. He lobbied for equal pay for equal work for black soldiers. Again, did not win many of these battles, but he fought them. It was his intellectual curiosity and thirst for education that would be one Garfield’s most lasting legacies: He fought for the creation of the federal Department of Education as one of the reforms necessary for a maturing country, which had extended the franchise to Blacks in early Reconstruction. The man who shot him wanted his VP, Chester Arthur to be President--which happened, but Arthur died of kidney disease at the end of Garfield's term, and it is possible he was born on the Canadian side of the border, no one knows for sure.

King: A Life by Jonathan Eig

I was not 100% sure that I needed to know more about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life, but it turns out I was wrong about that. When it turned up on Obama's short summer reading list, I was sold. The author uses a trove of materials—some of them only recently available—augmented with voluminous archival work and hundreds of interviews for personal insights, to advance the already appreciable quantity of first-rate biographies and intensive scholarship on King. There were many things I knew, from the fact that his wife was well aware of his affairs, his tendency to be quick to forgive his own trespasses and slower to show the same to others, and the fact that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were spying on him--but there is a lot in here that I was unfamiliar with. He also recovers the man, foibles and all, from the too often hollowed-out, sainted symbol that competing ideologies have sanitized for national observance. The book starts with MLK's enslaved family's history in antebellum Georgia, his stern father’s high expectations, and his soothing mother’s calm warmth, through his April 1968 assassination in Memphis. The ambitious, anxious, contemplative, depressed, fun-loving, uncertain private King gets equal attention to the determined, eloquent, fearless public person in the spotlight. From his decrying state-sanctioned and vigilante violence to his stance against the U.S. war in Vietnam and his Poor People’s Campaign, it's all and paints a thorough picture of King.

The Revolutionary Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff

I very much enjoyed this biography of Samuel Adams, who was born into a prosperous family in 1722 in the city state of Boston. Adams could afford to attend and graduate from Harvard, but he squandered his inheritance before becoming Boston’s most inept tax collector. Elite education developed his mastery of words while downward mobility cultivated his empathy for working people — and his rage against men of fortunes, privileges and luck. He especially hated a fellow Bostonian, Thomas Hutchinson, who grew ever richer and more powerful by acquiring multiple offices, including chief justice of the superior court and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts — until Adams ruined his popularity with insidious rumors. Both sides crafted conspiracy theories. A lot of time is spent of Adams explaining why he felt unfairly dealt with. While Adams claimed that British leaders plotted to ruin colonial prosperity and freedom, Loyalists depicted Boston’s radicals as conspiring to dupe common people into wreaking anarchy. Adams became Boston’s leading revolutionary, rallying that seaport to resist Parliament’s taxes and reject British rule. Unlike his cousin John Adams, Samuel cared more about swaying men behind the scenes than about taking credit for posterity. Slipping in and out of backrooms, he seemed to manage every protest, riot, election and newspaper diatribe. His many friends recalled Adams as a selfless hero utterly devoted to liberty. His many enemies defined him as a reckless and deceitful incendiary. Adams left us too sparse a paper trail to find a deeper character between the polarized accounts, burning most of his letters lest they implicate friends in treason. Ironically, as the financially strapped Adams, he inherited the lowest rung on the family business ladder, and it is why he is widely known today.