This past week, I added Fred C. Kelly's biography of the Wright Brothers to my Amazon wish list. I saw and looked through it in the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Fairborn this past week. It appears readable and accessible, two real assets for someone like me. That's because in other bios I've read of the brothers, I've gotten lost in confusion over the mathematics and science of flight, which, for example, the brothers figured out, revising previous calculations of optimal wing shapes hypothesized by Otto Lilienthal.
I just added Richard Norton Smith's new biography of Nelson Rockefeller. Smith is talking about the book right now on CSPAN. I love Smith as an historian and a writer. (His biography of George Washington is one of my favorite treatments of the first president.) And Rockefeller loomed large on the American political scene when I was growing up.
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