David McCullough was a wonderful storyteller. This collection of his early essays is no exception. Brave Companions may be a peculiar title, but the journey was a beautiful one.

It was an unexpected thrill to read short stories by the author of the tremendous tomes Truman and John Adams, and some of the chapters were hints or previews of his later works, including Truman, Mornings on Horseback, The Great Bridge, The Path Between the Seas, and The Johnstown Flood. Thankfully, I own all of those, but I have more reading to do!

Companions covers a variety of subjects: Events, places, people, and times. McCullough’s charms come through in each, and his friendships and love of history shine. After finding myself in love with a bridge at the start of my reading path a decade ago, I met more of its builders, and then oohed and ahhed at its architectural drawings. I saw man carving his way through nature, and frozen in time in sculpture. All of this in a book with no pictures. That’s McCullough’s talent.

He speaks of artist friends with admiration, but did he know that he was an artist, too, and crafting his own story as he told theirs? He yearns for biographies not yet written (as of 1992, but how many still unwritten, today?), and the reader may want more of his own. McCullough died in 2022, a loss for non-fiction and for history itself. He had a rare eye for seeing the past in the present; the present in the past.

I would like to have seen original publication dates and sources at the start of each chapter, but they are there, on the copyright page, if you look. Otherwise, I have no complaints. I just wish I were an adventurer, too.

Haven’t read much by McCullough. Seems just a hair pretentious, like all liberal historians (I majored in history). But never mind all that. This is really good. It’s like having coffee with maybe the most fascinating collection of people you could pick. Just look who is here:

Alexander von Humboldt, geographer, naturalist, surveyor, and much more, an “academy unto himself.” When visiting Jefferson in the White House to describe his, the first, explorations of South America, Humboldt flummoxed his listeners – but not Jefferson himself – by slipping unknowingly from English to German to French and Spanish.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, who Lincoln called “the little woman who made this big war.” She knew her share of tragedy and wrote a great deal more than Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Frederic Remington who put “the West” in our mind’s eye.

Teddy Roosevelt in his Medora, North Dakota, incarnation.

Louis Agassiz, the Harvard professor who made vast institutional and scientific contributions to zoology, geology, and elsewhere, rooted in his admonition to his students to “look at your fish.”

Pioneering pilots Charles and Anne Lindbergh, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Beryl Markham.

Harry Caudill, the Kentucky lawyer who made strip mining an issue.

Dame Miriam Rothschild (yes, of those Rothschilds) who earned international recognition for her study of fleas, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and collected paintings by schizophrenics.

The men who made the Brooklyn Bridge, its designer John A. Roebling, and his son Washington Roebling who erected it. They invented technologies and tools to do it, and put up the longest bridge in the world at the time and, perhaps still, the most beautiful.

Conrad Richter, the author who brought the American frontier to the readership of the world.

David Plowden, gifted photographer of vanishing industrial and agricultural America.

In the introduction, McCullough tells us he found these people much more alike than he imagined before collecting his essays about them into a book. I won’t spoil the fun of discovering just how they were alike or what the significance of that is. However, McCullough also included two speeches at the end, one extolling travel and the other history that drive his main thoughts home.

Oh if you love history you need to read this book!. It is read by David McCulough and is wonderful. I an amazing at all his stories of such incredible people. I loved getting to know their part in our world.

Check out his bucket list at the end.

Always enjoy McCullough’s work. This is a collection of impressions, reminiscences, some history, on people and subjects most of us don’t know or think about. Most still relevant today, even though first published almost 30 years ago. His advice....read history, know history! I agree.

One of the best books I've read this year. Thank you Pamela for the recommendation! And that is why I go to book club. I think his personal comments were even better than the chapters about "brave companions". The West Virginia chapter got boring and went too long.

A friend loaned me this book. Written in 1992, it is a compilation of short stories about relatively obscure men and women who made an indelible mark on the history of our country. McCullough's story telling of these individuals is both educational and enjoyable. A very fun read.

3.5 stars. A little information about a lot of random topics. This is a collection of unrelated essays and articles written by McCullough for various purposes. Some chapters were super engaging and fascinating to me. Others I had a hard time getting interested in. There are definitely some topics I’d like to learn more about.

One of my favorite non-fiction writers, producing a book of short stories on men and women "who have changed the course of history or changed how we see the world."

One of my favorites was not about a person but about a city-Washington, D.C. I enjoyed his take on the city on the Potomac. He had me walking those streets and viewing the monuments late at night while curled up in bed.

A perfect book to carry around as I ran all my errands and visited physician offices this week.

One of the finest essay collections I have read. Chapter 14, “Washington in the Potomac,” is worth the price of the book alone. But all of it—wonderfully written, beautifully described and full of wisdom.

Really great book. Collection of short biographies of people who made a significant difference but who are not commonly well know these days.

Snapshots of lesser-known Americans, well-researched and -written in McCullough's typical style, but not very engaging for me personally. (Audio version is difficult to understand!)

A collection of McCullough's short pieces. Some read as if they were research rabbit holes he dived down when he was looking up stuff for one of his books. Some are personal reminiscences (I now want to find and read everything ever written by Conrad Richter). There is a wonderful mini-bio of Harriet Beecher Stowe and another terrific piece on naturalist Miriam Rothschild (she invented safety belts--!). Some of the topics did not stir me to read further than the first page but Chapter Nine, "Long-Distance Vision," about pilots who wrote as well as they flew (Charles Lindbergh, Beryl Markham, Antoine de St. Exupery among others) was worth the price of the book all by itself. Worth reading, or even skimming.