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).