World Famous Comics: Dawn Over Kitty Hawk: The Novel of the Wright Brothers
Dawn Over Kitty Hawk: The Novel of the Wright Brothers
By: Walter J. Boyne Publisher: Forge Books Average Rating: Binding: Mass Market Paperback Label: Forge Books Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 432 Publication Date: August 02, 2005 Release Date: August 02, 2005
Walter J. Boyne, the world's foremost historian on aviation and the former director of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, presents this fascinating, historically accurate, fictional account of all the cutthroat personalities who strived to be the first to take the air. Of course Wilbur and Orville Wright etched their names in history as the inventors of the airplane, but lost are their contemporaries who shared their same passion. Some spent entire lives and fortunes chasing the dream of flight, including men like the embittered Augustus Herring, the pompous Samuel Pierpont Langley of the Smithsonian Institution, who was backed by the U.S. War Department, Glenn Curtiss, the Wright Brothers most fierce competition, and even the legendary American inventor Alexander Graham Bell---after all, what these men set out accomplish would surely catapult them into fame and fortune, and drastically alter the course of history for decades to come.
Rummaging around pays off .. While rummaging around a local Dollar General Store, I came across this book which, I am happy to say, I bought new for 75 cents. It sounded interesting and I took it home. I laid it down and looked at it for weeks ... then, one day, I took the journey.
"Dawn Over Kitty Hawk" is categorized as a novel. While I might concur that Walter J. Boyne took some liberties ..... I mean, what biographer doesn't? This book is much more a biography than a novel.
While reading I took the time to look up information about the Wright Brothers and the race to develop the first "controllable" power flying machine. Boyne is dead on with respect to his facts.
Boyne goes further in delving into the minds of Wilbur and Orville Wright than most Wright biographers have.
It is a fascinating and informative read.
Densel Myers Yukon, Oklahoma
Flight Dawn Over Kitty Hawk is a first class narrative history of the early years of flight, not only the Wright brothers, but skillfully weaving in the story of others. This is a first class story of the rivalry that existed as man tried to imitate birds and fly through the air with the greatest of ease. It is informative as well as entertaining.
Ponder the oxymoron of historical fiction. The Wright brothers are truly a remarkable story, they represent American ingenuity at its best. Lacking scientific education, unbacked by any government or corporate sponsorship, they conquered the "problem of flight" in only 5 years, mostly by using bicycle-shop practicality to surmount a huge number of daunting technical problems.
While this book is a fun read if you like to see the pompous and the devious outwitted by the humble and the forthright (who doesn't?), I have to say that historical fiction always leaves me with an empty feeling. Does the historical record really need the embellishment of conversations, thoughts, and situations that the author invented? Boyne's high view of the Wrights, and dim view of the competition, create a Disneyesque (Star Warsesque?) world in which every character is either good or evil. Most historians quickly realize that the real world is far more complex than that.
Anyway, the book is a good but not excellent read. I'm perplexed by the somewhat tangential sexual overtones (beginning on page 1), as if the editor told the author to "add sex into the novel in at least 5 places, so it will sell!" The dialogue is sometimes sublime, but often ridiculous. The author demonstrates his command of the aeronautics and engineering involved. Too bad he was somehow convinced that a novel, rather than a biography, would be a better way to go ...
Great Story, Well Told, About Aviation Heroes Having written an historical novel myself ("Devil in the North Woods), I recognize the result of many long hours of research and the skill needed to bring history to life for the reader.
Walt Boyne has taken the well-known story of aviation icons, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and breathed life into what is all-too-often dry history. Quickly, the story carries you into their lives, thoughts, hopes and fears as these two amazing young men bucked the trends of conventional wisdom and the opinions of men allegedly possessing far more experience.
The result is the very human story of true genius at work. If their efforts and results were not documented facts, it would be hard to believe. With compassion and insight, Boyne has created a tour-de-force for all aviation and history fans!
Don't waste your money. Perhaps it's because I work at a national historical park devoted to the Wright brothers, but I could not restrain the impulse to repeatedly roll my eyes while reading this "novelization" of the Wright brothers. Maybe it's because I deal every day with the information dramatized in this novel that I could not willingly suspend my disbelief or curb the urge to exclaim "He (pick your real life figure) would not say that!" Or perhaps it's because I, personally, found the writing to be not that great--I spotted a typo almost immediately--and the exposition to be clunky at best that I could not take this novel seriously in the slightest. I heard from co-workers that this book caused quite the hubbub with some people when it was first published, and while I don't find the supposedly racy parts to be anything other than awkward or pointless, it was sort of interesting to read something that made me laugh out loud at its ridiculousness. I guess that's my problem with all novels of this ilk: I can't read a dramatization of something or someone that actually happened when the source material is infinitely more interesting and accurate. This was good for a laugh in a "I can't believe someone actually wrote this, and someone else published this" sort of way, and for that I gave it a single star. However, had I paid actual money to read this rather than borrow it from the library, I would have demanded a refund.
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