Another fine and refreshingly nice-to-read look at history by McCullough, this time a loosely-bound series of vignettes of various historical personages. They're all fascinating and all worthy of reading. My favorites were the sections on Humboldt, Miriam "Microscopes are my marijuana" Rothschild, and the essay on the guy fighting strip-miners in eastern Kentucky (there is Appalachian anti-corporate terrorism, people!). They're all good, though. You'll pick up something new to delve into deeper (Conrad Richter, for me) and learn a lot about little windows on our past that goes to show how any schmuck with an idea can make good.

Great stories of intrepid courageous historical people. So interesting that you didn't want the book of essays to end.

Masterful, inspirational narrative history. This is a good place to start if you haven't read McCullough.

Unlike McCullough's other books, this is a collection of vignettes on a wide array of very enjoyable topics.

Of course, I would read McCullough's grocery list.

I love the way David McCullough writes. He writes biographies and histories that read like novels. This book was broken down into essays on extraordinary events and famous, interesting people who have left their mark on the world. Teddy Roosevelt, Louis Agassiz, Harriet Beecher Stowe, etc. There are seventeen chapters about seventeen fascinating people and/or events. Most of these were written as articles and published in magazines. McCullough just brought them together and made them into a book.

McCullough writes with clarity about interesting people in this book. Each chapter is about a different person in history and can be easily read at one sitting. It's only 232 pages. I learned a lot about many interesting people I never even knew before.

McCullough is simply a treasure of an author who captures American history in such great depth and detail. Here he tells some obscure stories about people who influenced our country. Humboldt, Remington, Lindbergh and Teddy Roosevelt are a few the figures that we learn more about.

Let me begin with expressing my unbridled respect for David McCullough.

If I haven't read everything this man has written, it wasn't for the lack of trying. He made the building of the Brooklyn Bridge one of the most fascination moments in American History. Because of all this pre-established respect and admiration; my disappointment with n  Brave Companionsn is very hard to express.

I thought it must be me, my mood, the weather, the tinnitus, anything but David's writing. I read it twice, then downloaded the Audible.com copy and listened to the man himself, a narrator's narrator, read his own work.

Eh!

That was my overall reaction. I felt as if this was all written just to write something. This is a similar experience to when I read Vidal's 1876. I loved his Burr and Lincoln but 1876 seemed to me to have been written just get out another Vidal version of America history.

Don't get me wrong about the writing. It is of McCullough's quality, well done and well researched. I don't doubt for a moment the veracity of every word.

I just don't care.

I need to be grabbed by at least one character, one event, one conclusion either historical or philosophical. I grasped here and there and nothing pulled me in.

All in all, I can't say this is a good read. I am so very sorry to say that.

Very nice stories about lesser known figures in history. Written with McCullough's typical wit and breadth of context. Well worth the time.

This was a re-read for me .

David McCullough has a great knack for finding topics and people that are off a lot of people's radar but can convey the story of not only the person, but their amazing accomplishments that often go unheralded in modern times.

My favorite story has to be the journey through the Illinois countryside with famous photographer David Plowden and the way he sees the simplicity of the small American town as the basis for many of his best photos. The building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the lives of John and his son Washington Roebling are fascinating accounts and show how detailed the plans and miraculous the building of the bridge truly was.

His love for Washington D.C comes through clearly in the end as well and if there ever was someone born to do their work it is definitely Mr McCullough. He has a very strong ability to make historical figures come to life and even topics that one would find dull can seem that much more fascinating when told by the right author.

This is mainly a collection of short essays and articles written by him over the years and the variety of subjects from Theodore Roosevelt to Harriet Beecher Stowe to Miriam Rothschild will give the reader some great insight into brilliant people, some of whom history has not told the full and amazing story about.

Great read

3.5 stars. Had some stories I really liked and others That didn’t grab me. My favorites: Washington on the Potomac, Remington, Cross the Blue Mountain, and the American Adventure of Louis Agassiz.

Brave Companions is a collection of essays written by David McCullough during the late 1960s and early 1970s. McCullough apparently is allowed to write about whatever interests him, and since he is interested in many things, the essays cover a wide range of topics. The book informs us that McCullough originally imagining himself a portrait painter, but instead he became a writer and paints his portraits with words instead.

The first essay introduces us to Alexander von Humbolt. I had heard of the name before, but I could not have told you what he was famous for. Humbolt was an 18th century explorer of Central and South America, he covered an incredible amount of terrain that was mostly uncharted wilderness. He paddled up the Orinoco River into the Amazon basin, collecting specimens as he went, often the first European to see these species. Somehow, Humbolt collected thousands of samples, he had crates of specimens, a whole museum worth of interesting artifacts to classify. In my head, I imagine those classic Victorian expeditions where 100 porters haul tea sets and dining tables into the jungle. (Humbolt was a Prussian, not British). I wonder how all those collections were transported home for future study. Humbolt roamed for 5 years (1799 - 1804 ) in Latin America. He and his companions hiked over the Andes and into Peru. The famous Peruvian current, the Humbolt current, is named after him. In 1802, Humbolt and his companions attempted to climb Chimborazo in Ecuador, then thought to be the tallest mountain in the world at 20651 feet. They stopped short of the summit, reaching 19268 feet, but it was higher than any European had ever been, including higher than the highest hot air balloon.

The second essay describes Louis Agassiz, a 19th century scientist famous for classification of fish, later, he switched to glaciology and became the first person to suggest that at one point in Earth's history, great sheets of ice had covered much of the earth. Agassiz was a popular lecturer, drawing crowds of 3000 to hear him speak (he was a Harvard professor).

An essay about Harriett Beecher Stowe describes how her 1851 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin fueled the abolitionist movement because it depicted the humanity of blacks; recognizing that they are just like white people. When Lincoln met Stowe, he was quoted as saying: "So this is the little woman who made this big war."

The article on Theodore Roosevelt describes how he came to North Dakota and toughened himself up. The ranch failed, but Roosevelt did become a robust "rough rider". Roosevelt's written descriptions of the American West did a lot to popularize our vision of the frontier. McCullough later wrote Mornings on Horseback to expand this material about Roosevelt.

Roosevelt's contemporary was the painter Frederich Remington. A prolific painter who specialized in scenes of the West, Remington was a huge man (he weighed over 300 lbs) who was hugely successful, his paintings also gave us the enduring vision of the west. He died a wealthy man.

An article about the Panama Railroad is one of the best in the book. The 47 mile railroad was the first transcontinental railroad built, at the enormous cost of $8 million and approximately 6000 lives. Plagued by rain, mud, cholera and insects, it took 4 years to build, finished on Nov 24, 1853. It proved to be an enormous financial success, carrying prospectors to California and gold back to the East Coast. McCullough late wrote A Path Between the Seas describing the construction of the Panama Canal, so clearly he loved this material.

There are two articles about the Brooklyn Bridge. McCullough wrote a book called The Great Bridge, these articles may be bonus material that didn't get into his book.

An essay about early pilots who were also writers (the wife of Lindbergh, Beryl Markham. Amelia Earhart, Antoine de Saint-Exupery) is one of the weaker entries to this book. McCullough later wrote the excellent The Wright Brothers.

I had never heard of the author Conrad Richter, but he was famous for his novels The Trees, The Fields, and The Town about early pioneers settling in Ohio. McCullough later wrote The Pioneers which seems to cover the same topic, so maybe he was inspired by his interviews with Richter.

The article about the lawyer Harry Caudill is especially depressing. Written in the 1960s, it describes the horrific damage to the Kentucky Appalachian region by destructive strip mining techniques. Obviously, Caudill failed to stop the ruthless mining companies. Even 50 years after McCullough's story, strip mining continues. The former administration relaxed regulations to allow coal miners to continue their destruction of the landscape in their endless, destructive quest for profits from coal.

The article about Miriam Rothschild, a brilliant wealthy woman who studies insects isn't that interesting.

The story of photographer David Plowden makes it sound like his pictures are uninteresting. I did an internet search of "David Plowden Photographs" and see a display of empty farms, old buildings, open landscapes, old trains. etc.

Washington on the Potomac is McCullough's enthusiastic description of our capital city.

McCullough is an interesting writer, I am sure all of his books are worth reading. I have read 1776 and The Wright Brothers, I need to decide which one to read next.

I love this author but I didn’t prefer this book.