The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man

The 20th century was one of conflict and upheaval—as well as a time of exciting advances in technology, culture, and human rights. In The Book of Charlie, Von Drehle focuses on the life story of his subject, Charlie White, an American man who lived from 1905 to 2014 and experienced this century of change firsthand. Von Drehle’s historical summaries about the early 20th century illuminate the conditions Charlie White lived through, and how they affected his personal and professional life as a young man.

The Book of Charlie starts with White’s birth at the beginning of the 20th century, a time before so many of the developments of the modern world: women’s suffrage, reliable medical care, universal electricity, civil rights, and the invention of the radio and airplanes. Von Drehle writes of early 20th-century America:

So dawned the twentieth century in a world that had yet to see a human being fly; in a country where more than 75 million people owned a total of only 8,000 automobiles; where just ten percent of doctors had a college education, and diarrhea was a leading cause of death (22).

This was the American “agrarian past” which White was born into, where “middle-class people lived without electricity or running water, when humans didn’t fly and antibiotics didn’t exist” (5).

Just nine years after White was born, World War I and the concurrent Spanish flu pandemic took a heavy toll on people around the world, killing millions. Luckily, a young White avoided both and came of age in the “roaring twenties.” This was the age of the train in America: Most Americans did not own a car and relied on the nation's passenger trains for long-distance travel. Von Drehle describes the 1920s in White’s hometown, Kansas City, as “the best of times and the worst of times” (85). It was at once “a canvas for dreamers; a sty of corruption and the Klan” (85). In the 1920s, the American economy thrived, and people quickly adopted a new technology that revolutionized media and communication: the household radio. Then a college student, White was inspired by the jazz music he heard on the radio. He decided to take up the saxophone and start a band, allowing him to make ends meet as he studied at college.

The medical field White was entering was incredibly limited compared to today. In the 1920s doctors struggled to understand and reliably cure common diseases and did not have the inventions or antibiotics necessary to perform many surgeries. Meanwhile, charlatans such as Norman Baker and John Romulus Brinkley marketed useless alternative cures. As an aspiring doctor, White hoped to confront this “wild frontier of quackery” (91).

By the time White graduated from college, economic conditions had worsened. The Great Depression of the 1930s had begun, and at its worst nearly 25% of Americans were unemployed (“Great Depression Facts.” FDR Presidential Library & Museum). By that time, White had graduated from college and was ready to begin work as a doctor. Like other physicians at the time, White made house calls to his clients; he struggled financially since his clientele were often too poor to pay for his services. Von Drehle explains how professionals like White survived during this decade:

Like others surviving the Depression, Charlie became an expert trader. If a man owned a service station, Charlie might treat the man’s hernia in exchange for a few free tanks of gasoline, or a discount on a new set of tires. A patient with a chicken coop might pay with surplus eggs (116).

Soon after, White’s life changed yet again. World War II began, and White decided to contribute to the war effort as a physician. He moved to an Army hospital where he treated soldiers and trained in anesthetics. Because of the high rate of serious injuries, World War II physicians were at the forefront of inventing new surgical methods. Von Drehle explains: “Like penicillin and anesthesia, cardiac surgery got a boost from WW Il” (159). Research took medicine in a new direction, as surgeons built on their methods of shrapnel removal to invent new surgeries that could address other health issues in the civilian population.

These developments directly affected White’s career as an anesthesiologist, and he embraced these advances. Von Drehle writes: “Charlie and his colleagues in Kansas City were intrigued to read in medical journals about experimental surgery to repair stenotic valves” (159-160). By the 1950s, White was making his own contribution to this novel surgery, figuring out how to ice patients before surgery in order to slow their blood flow and reduce bleeding. From travel to education and work, Von Drehle shows how White constantly adapted to the rapid societal and technological changes of early 20th-century America.