To Fly: The Story of the Wright Brothers - Hardcover

Old, Wendie C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 061813347X ISBN 13: 9780618133475

Publisher: Clarion Books, 2002

Synopsis

Orville and Wilbur Wright were a fascinating pair. Not only did they invent, build, and fly the first airplane, they were also idiosyncratic individuals who had a unique relationship, sharing a home, a bank account, and a business throughout their lives. Their story is portrayed here in brief, accessible chapters, beginning with their childhood fascination with flight and love of problem solving, then detailing their early experiments and dangerous trial runs in North Carolina, and ending with their successful flights of 1903. This well-researched and personable biography is illustrated with elegant watercolors by flight enthusiast and noted artist Robert Andrew Parker. Timeline, endnotes, bibliography.

About this title

About the Author:

Wendie Old has been a storyteller and children's librarian for over 30 years. She is the author of many books for children, including To Fly: The Story of the Wright Brothers. She currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland and can be visited online at wendieold.com
 

Robert Andrew Parker is a fine artist and printmaker whose work often appears in publications such as The New Yorker. His numerous children’s books include To Fly: The Story of the Wright Brothers, Across the Blue Pacific: A World War II Story, and Grandfather Tang’s Story. He lives in West Cornwall, Connecticut.
 

From School Library Journal:

Grade 3-5-Some may question whether anyone needs another book on the Wright brothers. What is there new to say? Many biographies sufficiently document their trials, errors, and successes. And like Russell Freedman's The Wright Brothers (Holiday, 1991), they benefit from careful research; the brothers themselves took and left copious notes and photographs. The advantage of this presentation is its style and accessibility and the story it tells of two brothers (alike in goals, different in personalities) who had ideas and kept at them, whose parents nurtured those ideas, that creativity, and critical thinking. Old takes readers along with a chronological approach and stops after the first heavier-than-air manned flight. She relates how two bicycle repairmen solved the problems that leading scientists of the time had been unable to master. She carefully and almost effortlessly helps youngsters to understand the steps: wind resistance, drag, the need for rounded front edges on a propeller, more accurate air-pressure tables. But her story ultimately shows how the brothers worked together-almost in tandem-like the bicycle wheels in their shop, and how each man's strengths complemented the other's. Parker's characteristic watercolors do more than inform Old's straightforward story. They help to set an inventive tone-a kind of experimental fluidity that floats through the book-as if something might be going to happen. And for young readers, something indeed does.
Harriett Fargnoli, Great Neck Library, NY
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Clarion Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 061813347X
• ISBN 13: 9780618133475
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 48
• Illustrator: Parker Robert Andrew