Randy Greenwald

As a seventh grade English teacher in Grant County, Kentucky years ago, I would, as English teachers are prone to do, ask my students to write stories based on some prompt. The question would always come, “How many pages, Mr. Greenwald?” I was hesitant to give such limits because I wanted stories to be told and not just pages to be filled. But they needed some kind of guide, a limit to aim for, and so I would give it to them with this caution: don’t let the page limit ruin your story. I urged them that if they were to reach the bottom of the second page of a two-page assignment to not begin the third page by saying, “And then, sadly, a brick fell on his head and he died. The end.”

A good story must have a satisfying ending.

And though that is the only fault I can find with Patrick Rothfuss’s fantasy The Name of the Wind, it is a hard and disappointing one.

Though I’m not usually drawn to the fantasy genre, two of my sons and another friend insisted that this was a book I should read. One son read all 722 pages in just a few days while on a Coast Guard deployment. These are all people of good taste, and it seems, our tastes agree.

Rothfuss is a wonderful storyteller. His hero is an enjoyable character, one we are drawn to and love to cheer. He has placed him into a believable world of which he has given sufficient details that a reader can picture it with clarity. He introduces mystery and intrigue and then, at page 722, seems to have reached his pre-assigned word count and stops. Mysteries are left unsolved; story lines left hanging; conflict left unresolved.

In protest I may just need to leave his thousand page Part 2 unread and his yet to be published Part 3 on Amazon’s virtual shelf. The book would have been so good had there been a well planned and executed ending. But now, I question whether even the second book would resolve the conflict, unhang the story, and solve the mysteries. The world he created is a satisfying place to visit. But I feel like my tour bus was diverted and I was placed on the earliest flight home. I don’t like the disappointment that brings.

Apart from the disappointing last 100 pages or so, The Name of the Wind was a welcome companion over the past few weeks. I’m not going to quibble over the all too perfect characters. Life, as many of us know it, is all too full of insoluble nuance. Every now and then we need stories in which my good guys are good and my bad guys are bad; where all the men are strong, and all the girls good looking.

“That’s why stories appeal to us. They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.”

Stephen King’s short story The Mist suffered….

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[Editor’s note: It appears that before completing this post, Mr. Greenwald suffered a head contusion caused by a piece of falling masonry. Injuries were minor and we are assured he will return to this space soon.]

I never had any real interest in the Wright brothers until David McCullough wrote a book about them. His ability to tell a story made ME interested in what interested him. (HBO, by the way, has called him a ‘painter with words’. That may be excessive praise, but the short video they produced about him for their John Adams mini-series is worth watching.)

There are a handful of other writers of non-fiction who have the ability to make me interested in what interests them simply through the power of their storytelling.

Laura Hillenbrand

I’m persuaded that Laura Hillenbrand could compose a telephone book that would be captivating reading. Many have read Unbroken
and found it good. Ms. Hillenbrand’s other book, Seabiscuit is about a racehorse and, we think, we have no interest in racehorses. Think again.

Those who have read her books will find this article by Wil Hylton, The Unbreakable Laura Hillenbrand a wonderful read in its own right as well as a fascinating insight both into her method and why books from her are slow in coming.

Erik Larson

On the first day of a several day stay in downtown Chicago with my wife a few years ago, I bought and began to read Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City. This book remarkably combines the fascinating story of the 1898 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the story of a serial murderer haunting the shadows of that event. The book’s subtitle tells it all: “Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America”. Reading it while in Chicago made it all the better, but wherever I would have read it Mr. Larson would have had my attention.

Other books by Larson are good, though a bit inconsistent in their ability to capture my interest. His latest, Dead Wake
, about the sinking of the luxury cruise liner Lusitania is very good.

David Mariniss

A professor of creative non-fiction at Rollins College recommended to me David Mariniss’ book Rome 1960 about the summer Olympics of 1960. Suddenly reading about Wilma Rudolph and Cassius Clay and the barefoot marathoner from Ethiopia became what I HAD to do.

William Manchester

This list would not be complete without mentioning William Manchester. His biographies of Douglas MacArthur, American Caesar and of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion are so, so good and worthy of multiple readings.

The Churchill biography illustrates the power a gifted storyteller brings to the page. Manchester was able to complete the first two volumes of this three volume work telling Churchill’s story up to WWII. Subsequent to the publication of these, Manchester suffered a debilitating stroke which left him unable to finish the third planned volume. He passed his research on to a trusted friend who completed the work. The third volume lacks in the sparkle and narrative power of the first two. The storyteller had been replaced with a reporter.

Stephen Ambrose

Ambrose was once a prolific and always captivating author on the lives of the ordinary soldier of World War II. Band of Brothers is well known both as a book and as an excellent mini-series. Citizen Soldiers is an excellent reflection on how the demands of the war elicited uncommon leadership from common men and women. And Ambrose’s account of the explorations of Lewis and Clark, Undaunted Courage
explores similar themes in a different era. All are worth reading.

Sadly, in the last year of his life, charges of plagiarism tarnished his reputation. In defense, he admitted that he did not apply all the standards of an academic publication to his work, but leaned heavily on this assertion: “I tell stories.”

That is the gift of each of these. They tell stories – and I listen.

It’s not because I’m teetering on the brink of antiquity that I’ve picked up Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End to read. Rather, I chose it because it was recommended by a medical-student-to-be and because it deals with a subject my profession brings before me with some regularity. Death comes to the archbishop, priest, and parishoner alike. And it will come to me no matter how hard I try to ignore it. Gawande reminds us with relentless detail just how mortal we are.

“…at the age of thirty the brain is a three-pound organ that barely fits inside the skull; by our seventies, gray-matter loss leaves almost an inch of spare room.”

That’s harsh.

We run out of pigment in our scalp (thus re-coloring our hair). Our arteries grow hard and our teeth grow soft. The amount of light reaching the retina of a sixty-year old is 1/3 of that of a twenty-year old. And on he goes. We don’t die as much as we just wear out and run down.

I’m wearing out, and as hard as it is to be reminded of this it is good he has done so. That is, in fact, his point. The things we hide are the things with which we do not rightly deal. We ignore death. We push it aside, and sanitize it in hospitals and nursing homes. We pretend we can escape it, we act as if we can cheat it. But it comes to those we love and it comes to us. So there is wisdom in being forced to face it.

Someone once told me that I would not qualify as “old” until my children were closer to 50 than I am. That threshold is looming, as, perhaps, is “nature’s final victory” (per a surgeon Gawande quotes) And so we pray

Teach us to number our days
that we may get a heart of wisdom. (Psalm 90:12)

On Monday, October 18, 1909 witnesses gasped to see high in the sky over Paris, France, higher than the Eiffel Tower (then the tallest man-made structure on Earth) something never before seen over a major world city: an airplane. This one was a Wright brothers bi-plane piloted by a Wright friend and student, the Comte de Lambert. One witness was the American Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Edith Wharton who recorded her impressions.

It is not her impressions that interest me, nor the flight itself, as remarkable as that must have been. What interests me is that in his recent book The Wright Brothers, David McCullough refers to Ms. Wharton blandly as ‘the American writer Edith Wharton’. This may have been for McCullough nothing more than an incidental word choice. But I like to think that it arose from something deeper: from McCullough’s assessment of his vocation. He wants to be known simply as this: as a writer, a person who tells stories with words. The Presidential Medal of Freedom which McCullough was awarded calls him “…one of our nations most distinguished and honored historians…”. Though no doubt true, he is first and foremost, in his mind, simply a writer.

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I grew up in southwest Ohio, forty minutes or so from Dayton. When I was young I spent many enjoyable hours strolling through the magnificent Air Force Museum on the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Nevertheless, I had no particular interest in the sons of Dayton for whom the air force base was named. With the release of David McCullough’s book The Wright Brothers, I have become interested. A good storyteller does that. He compels one to become interested in what interests him.

The basic narrative of the brothers Wilbur and Orville was taught to most school children of my era. These two from Dayton designed and built the first ever airplane, testing and flying it, for some reason never then explained, off the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, NC. McCullough fills in the rather monstrous gaps in that narrative.

In a 1909 interview with a New York newspaper, Wilbur, reflecting perhaps on his life, said

“A man who works for the immediate present and its immediate rewards is nothing but a fool.”

Ignoring “the immediate present and its immediate rewards”, the brothers attacked the problem of flight like none before them. Further, the design and building of a flying machine was only part of the challenge before them. They also had to learn how to pilot one, knowing that any error along the way could (and almost did) kill them. They worked obsessively, mostly in obscurity, often under great pressure, and sometimes in the face of mockery.

And yet they were not indifferent to immediate rewards. They attracted notoriety, and became acquainted with a wide span of celebrity, nobility, and royalty. But they never let their own celebrity lull them into complacency or rashness. They did not fly to impress, but to succeed. That that they did.

Living until age 77, Orville survived to see both the good and the potential for destruction their invention brought to the world. Wilbur, on the other hand, died of typhoid fever in 1912.

In all the years they had been working together Wilbur and Orville had never once flown together, so if something were to go wrong and one of them should be killed, the other would live to carry on with the work. But on this day at Huffman Prairie, where they had developed the first practical flying machine ever, the two of them, seated side by side, took off into the air with Orville at the controls.

To many then and later, it seemed their way of saying they had accomplished all they had set out to do and so at last saw no reason to postpone any longer enjoying together the thill of flight.” (page 253)

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The quality of a story is often found in what is withheld. A good writer does not obscure his story under a weight of detail but keeps his focus and lets the story unfold. I would like to know more about why the brothers were so fastidious about not working on Sunday, and others might want to know greater details about their legal battles. If we all got our wishes, the book would double in size and be half as interesting.

David McCullough’s degree from Yale is in English literature. Whether he qualifies as a historian, I’ll leave to others to decide. Clearly, he is a writer, one for whom I continue to be grateful.

[Footnote point of regional pride: Why does North Carolina gets the cool ‘First in Flight’ license plates? All they provided was isolation, sand, and a prevailing wind for the boys from Ohio to ply their magic!]