The Book of Charlie by David Von Drehle

Born before radio was invented and living to see smart phones, one-hundred-nine-year-old Charlie White knew about adaptation. An early life of horse and buggies eventually replaced with the sleek, fast vehicles of today can be a metaphor for all the changes Charlie lived through.

When David Von Drehle moved his family to Kansas

City to work remote for his Washington Post job, it was pure chance that his neighbor was Charlie. Wanting to write a book for his kids and being charmed by the elderly man across the street was the impetus for this remarkable story of Charlie White's life.

Charlie's mother's parenting boiled down to one thing: do the right thing. Growing up well before helicopter parenting, Charlie decided that "you have to do your own paddling" because no one is going to do it for you. The author writes that resourcefulness is a close cousin of resilience and Charlie's life demonstrates this time and again. In the telling of his life Charlie insisted on the joyful version. It made him happier.

Reading about the perpetually cheerful Charlie was like a lesson in fortitude. When eight-year-old Charlie's father dies in a freak accident, his mother sets about supporting her four young children with barely a moan of complaint. Like his mother, Charlie turns the threat of change into an opportunity to grow over and over throughout his life. As the author writes, some people use adversity to assert their truest freedom. This was Charlie.

Like when little Charlie decides to walk home from summer camp to escape what was likely a pedophile. And when sixteen-year-old Charlie sets off on an odyssey with two friends in an early model T to cross half a continent (an incredible feat in the days before highways or road maps) and then jump trains to get all the way back to Kansas.

After high school, Charlie goes about learning to play the saxophone by listening to the radio and earns enough to pay his way through college. When he doesn't get accepted into Northwestern for medical school, he goes to Admissions in person and talks his way in. As an intern, Charlie rides ambulances through Al Capone's Chicago and even performs an experimental blood transfusion on a gunned down gangster (using his own blood!) on the street - this was before medical lawsuits and malpractice.

Charlie became a doctor in the days before antibiotics. It was the threshold of modern medicine; between the age of potions and the age of genome sequencing. Charlie's profession was full of charlatans and quacks hawking unregulated potions and powders. Most of what Charlie saw as a bag- carrying, house-call-making doctor had no cure. Usually what he could offer was advice on prevention, rest, fluids, and maybe a mustard plaster or a tonsil removal. Very often he was simply a grief counselor. During the depression he would get paid in eggs, a tank of gasoline, or an old encyclopedia.

Then World War II changed everything. With the invention of antibiotics, open heart surgery and anesthesia, health care transformed. Charlie adapts again and becomes trained as one of the first anesthesiologists in Kansas City. He was alert to the next open door and Charlie walked through.

Charlie told the author about his marriages with his characteristic stoicism. His first wife suffered through mental illness before committing suicide and Charlie showed again that hardships are not taken the same by all people. Charlie moves on and finds love: for a time with a female fighter jet pilot and then yet again, and most joyfully, with the mother of Oscar winning actor Chris Cooper.

After Charlie dies, the author finds a handwritten list of Charlie's distilled philosophies on life. Among Think freely and Be soft sometimes was Make some mistakes and Learn from them. Charlie's simple truths should be a manual on living. Work hard, Spread joy, Take a chance, Enjoy wonder. Charlie White lived so long he saw that life is not so hard as we tend to make it. As the author sums up, Charlie thrived through a maelstrom of change by standing on ground that was permanent. Like a handbook on life and a lesson in American history all in one, this work of non-fiction was extraordinary!