Wilbur and Orville Wright

Wilbur and Orville Wright: the Flight to Adventure
Louis Sabin
Published by Troll Associates

What I want to highlight in this blog post is the publisher. About 20 years ago, my husband and I brought home stack after stack of children's biographies from the library on a very specific quest. We were looking for books about famous people that were told with an engaging narrative style. We found many biographies that were packed with wonderful information and would serve a child well who had to do some research or who enjoyed information books. It was more difficult to find a biography that had both information and an enjoyable narrative. We discovered that the Troll Books had this very aim. We found that book after book in this series recounted the lives of famous people from the standpoint of how they overcame obstacles from the time they were young in order to accomplish something. In the case of the the Wright Brothers, their pursuits reveal the virtues of hard work and of close family relationships. The author, Louis Sabin, wrote several biographies for Troll in the style they were looking for. Some of them are:

Andrew Jackson: Frontier Patriot
Jim Beckwourth: Adventures of a Mountain Man
Roberto Clemente: Young Baseball Hero
Young Mark Twain
The Great Houdini: Daring Escape Artist

Sabin also wrote many informational books for children. The range of topics is impressive: weather, grasslands, reptiles, radio, space exploration, plants and seeds... Here is a link from a website about authors that provides a list of books by Sabin.
http://www.jacketflap.com/louis-sabin/97476

And I cannot end this post without telling you about one more great book about the Wright brothers. (There are so many great books about them!)
The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane by Russell Freedman.
First, any book by Russell Freedman is awesome - and I mean it! He is the gold standard in nonfiction books for children. This book is full of rare photos taken by the Wright Brothers and it describes in good historical detail how they went about accomplishing their big dream. On top of all the good facts, this book won the Newbery Honor - the yearly award for the best book written for children. I rest my case.