History Booked

Not too differently than the way the cowboy kind of sums up a lot of folks' idea of America, the samurai warrior sums up a lot of folks' ideas about Japan. The strict codes of honor, fearless attitude in battle and disregard for their own safety or their lives colors a lot of images people have of even modern-day Japan, though they might be seen by modern Japanese as every bit as outdated as the cowboy does to a lot of Americans.

Jonathan Clements' A Brief History of the Samurai is exactly that, sketching how the warrior culture began in medieval Japan and grew gradually into a dominant force overpowering the nominal authority of the imperial court. He also outlines the peak of samurai power during the isolationist feudal totalitarian years of the Tokugawa Shōgunate and its decline and downfall when modernizing movements helped restore the Emperor Meiji to power. Clements touches briefly on how the samurai ethos influenced the military commanders in the years leading up to World War II as well as a lot of Japanese entertainment culture in the postwar years.

He takes seriously the word "brief" in the title, sometimes to the point of fogginess for a careless reader. Some of the principals in several episodes have similar names and losing track is easy to do -- but someone exploring the final years of the English Plantagenets could do the same trying to sort out all the Henrys. Only pivotal episodes are dealt with in any detail, but Clements includes a listing of more extensive works to explore for people who want to learn more detail of, say, the Ashikaga Shōgunate between the 1330s and 1570s.

Clements helps clarify several details about samurai culture and offers some good guides for sorting out which popular pictures are kind of lacking and which are closer to the mark, as well as the aforementioned sources for more research. Both the demystification and the overall broad history are helpful work.

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Dayton, Ohio's Wright brothers were not necessarily the first people to get a heavier-than-air powered craft to fly. They were, though, almost certainly the first people to get it to fly for any length of time, under control, and land under its own power, so they are considered the inventors of the airplane. Most planes today rely on principles of aerodynamics first learned by the brothers as they studied birds and gliders in the first years of the 20th century.

Historian and biographer David McCullough's new book tells the story of the brothers' development of their Wright Flyer and takes them up through the creation of an airplane manufacturing company in 1910. It is much less intensively detailed that some of his other books, such as the Pulitizer-prize winning Truman and John Adams. McCullough only sketches the brothers' early years growing up Dayton, focusing on details that will have their role in the story of the airplane's creation but not much else. It offers a wider role that many have previously allowed for their sister Katherine Wright, the only Wright to earn a college degree, as she helped them during their time in Europe demonstrating their machine and training new pilots. And it does not focus heavily on the engineering side of the Wrights' development of their wing design or technical explanations of it.

But as always when reading McCullough about the people he's studied, we learn about the people he's studied. As mentioned, neither brother attended college and they began their professional lives as builders and repairers of bicycles. When they decided to try to create a powered heavier-than-air craft, they began by writing the Smithsonian Institute for information on birds and by writing to other aeronautical researchers for what they had studied. Having amassed their material, they started tinkering first with small gliders, learning from them, and then building bigger gliders. These larger gliders were first used in Kitty Hawk, N.C., and from studies of their performance came the actual Wright Flyer of 1903.

McCullough, using letters from the brothers to their sister and father, Bishop Milton Wright, outlines the creation of the camp at Kitty Hawk, dealing with its people and weather, and the methodical journey towards the first flight. As it details Orville and Wilbur's dogged and careful work, the central sections of The Wright Brothers read not unlike an Edwardian-era episode of Mythbusters: Experiment, failure, evaluate, experiment, success, evaluate, new experiment, and so on (Orville's mustache even evokes Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman's). McCullough ends the book's main section with a 1910 flight in which the brothers flew together -- their only such flight, as they had previously decided one of them must survive any possible crash -- and one with their father, An epilogue handles their trouble with patent lawsuits, business issues, Wilbur's early death from typhoid just nine years after their first flight and Orville's survival into the days of supersonic aviation.

Some folks, including some typically hyperventilating Amazon reviewers, fault The Wright Brothers for its lack of technical detail and expansion of the brothers' lives in pre- and post-Kitty Hawk days. But McCullough, whose biographies of Presidents John Adams and Harry Truman weigh in at 750 and 1100 pages respectively and who also wrote a 700-page history of the building of the Panama Canal, could have written that kind of book if he had wanted, so it seems best to judge Wright Brothers on its own terms. And on those terms -- a story of how two self-taught, meticulous and daring brothers at the turn of the 20th century figured out, step by careful step, how to fly -- it performs quiet well indeed.