Book Review|David Von Drehle Looked Both Ways, Then Met His Latest Subject

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/books/review/the-book-of-charlie-david-von-drehle.html

Inside the Best-Seller List

After decades of covering well-known people, the Washington Post columnist was inspired by a man who lived on his block.

In this photograph, David Von Drehle is wearing a green baseball cap and a plaid shirt. He's posing against a backdrop of mountains and clouds.
“Modern life does make it harder to know our neighbors,” Von Drehle said. He wishes he’d had more time with Charlie White.Credit...Karen Ball

David Von Drehle has written books about Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and capital punishment. In his new best seller, “The Book of Charlie,” the Washington Post opinion columnist wrote about someone who lived much closer to home — a man he considered a friend.

Charles Herbert White was a retired anesthesiologist, World War II veteran and magnetic raconteur who lived across the street from Von Drehle and his family in the suburbs of Kansas City, Mo. Beginning in 2007, when the Von Drehles moved to the neighborhood, until 2014, when White died on his 109th birthday, the two men enjoyed a series of freewheeling, time-hopping, inadvertently inspiring conversations in the little den at the back of White’s house. They didn’t set out to tackle the meaning of life; Von Drehle wasn’t recording their chats. He certainly wasn’t planning to immortalize White’s century of experiences in a volume that may prove to be one of this year’s go-to Father’s Day gifts.

“It was always comfortable, and always informal,” Von Drehle said in a phone interview. “We never scheduled a visit. I’d see that he was at home and I’d have 30 minutes or an hour free and I’d just go over and knock on the door.”

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When Charlie White was 16, he cooked up a plan to drive a Model T from Kansas City to Los Angeles with two friends. This grand adventure was one he returned to again and again in conversations with Von Drehle.Credit...via David Von Drehle

As White talked about his childhood in Galesburg, Ill., and Kansas City, time in the Air Force and medical school, two marriages and career challenges, Von Drehle was struck by his stoic approach to everything from child rearing to aging.

Stoicism “has a bad rap as a philosophy,” Von Drehle said. “People think it has to do with not having feelings or not caring about the world. But what it teaches is, we can only control our own selves, our own will, decisions and actions. We don’t control people; we don’t control the world; we don’t control the future. I think Charlie finally drove home that wisdom for me.”

After White died, Von Drehle started thinking about what his friend had survived — including two world wars, a pandemic and the Depression — and realized his own children are up against similar challenges in this tumultuous century. That’s when he got cracking on “The Book of Charlie,” relying on recordings White had made with Voices in Time, an organization dedicated to preserving family stories. (White’s picture appears on their website, alongside other snapshots that make you wish you’d asked more questions of your grandparents.)

“Charlie was extraordinary in terms of living a phenomenally long and healthy life, but he was a person you meet on the street or in the operating room,” Von Drehle said. “I run into people all over Kansas City who tell me he was in the delivery room when they were born; he took out their tonsils; he was their high school friend’s dad. He was an ordinary guy.”


Elisabeth Egan is an editor at the Book Review and the author of “A Window Opens.”

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