The Book Of Charlie

How do you stay steady when your world won’t stop changing? In The Book of Charlie, David Von Drehle argues that it’s possible to live well—joyfully, courageously, and usefully—through relentless upheaval. He contends that the key isn’t hidden hacks or superhuman talent; it’s an earned weave of Stoic clarity, action bias, resilience, and an eye for wonder. Charlie White—born in 1905, dead at 109—serves as the living case study. He crossed the arc from horse-drawn carriages and pre-penicillin medicine to jet travel, open-heart surgery, and smartphones, yet he kept his equilibrium and humor intact.

Von Drehle’s core claim is deceptively simple: you can’t control history’s waves, but you can learn to surf them. Charlie’s life becomes a field manual for surfing—equal parts “let go” (of outcomes, status, rage, and what-ifs) and “hold on” (to values, effort, and problem-solving). This blend shows up in dozens of moments: an 8-year-old absorbing his father’s sudden elevator death without becoming bitter; a teenager hopping freights from Los Angeles back to Kansas City; a Great Depression doctor trading house calls for eggs; a midlife pivot from general practice to anesthesiology when antibiotics rewired medicine overnight.

What the book argues

The book isn’t a conventional biography; it’s a quest for a usable philosophy. Von Drehle set out to give his children a survival guide for the digital revolution by finding someone who had already crossed a comparable chasm. He discovered that model across his suburban street: Dr. Charles Herbert White, one of the last living Americans born before women had the vote. The argument lands in three moves. First, radical change is the human condition now. Second, resilience is learnable—especially when you distinguish what you control (your actions and attitude) from what you don’t (fate, other people, outcomes). Third, joy isn’t naïveté; it’s a discipline that makes endurance sustainable.

Charlie’s two-beat wisdom

“Let it go” for what you can’t control. “Hold on” to what you can—your effort, your choices, your cheer.

Why this matters now

If you feel whipsawed by AI, remote work, and algorithmic everything, you’re living Charlie’s dilemma at a faster frame rate. He began doctoring when mercury and mustard plasters were common prescriptions; he finished his career icing patients in a horse trough to pioneer early heart surgery, then embraced modern anesthesiology after a wartime crash course at the Mayo Clinic. That same mental flexibility—curious, humble, iterative—is what you need when your industry or identity gets refactored by code. (Compare to Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile and Angela Duckworth’s Grit.)

How the book teaches

Von Drehle teaches by story. You’ll sit on a Kansas City hillside with 9-year-old Charlie as Union Station rises by horse and human muscle. You’ll lurch across America at 16 in a 1917 Model T with two friends, paint “The Unconscious Three” on the door, and learn to pour soda pop into a boiling radiator. You’ll scavenge golf balls, tune in to WDAF’s midnight jazz, and teach yourself tenor sax by playing along with the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks. You’ll treat pneumonia in a crowded tenement with a coal range warming ether; you’ll barter a tonsillectomy for an 1890s Encyclopaedia Britannica. And you’ll pivot—again—when penicillin and war reorganize the medical world.

What you’ll take away

You’ll learn a resilient frame: decide fast on the next right action; do not outsource your attitudes; keep a playful eye for the marvelous. You’ll see a practical method for career reinvention (recognize inflection points, re-skill quickly, and iterate forward). You’ll absorb an ethical core—“Do the right thing,” as Charlie’s mother taught—that stops you from becoming brittle or cynical. And you’ll have a set of compact maxims to carry: “This will pass.” “Keep your daubers up.” “Nobody’s going to do it for you.”

Why Charlie convinces

He isn’t airbrushed. He loses two marriages—one to addiction and suicide (Mildred), one to misfit timing with WASP pilot Jean Landis—and later marries Lois, then becomes a widower again. He makes wrong bets (turns down investing in Aspen and in Ewing Kauffman’s basement pharma start-up). He works amid Kansas City’s mobbed-up Pendergast machine, refuses kickbacks, and loses hospital privileges for it. Yet he keeps choosing courage over comfort—quitting and rejoining the military, learning cutting-edge anesthesia, and literally tying a suicidal patient’s swollen tongue to a bedrail to keep him alive. His optimism isn’t a mood; it’s a practiced stance.

If you want a modern, portable philosophy for turbulent times, this book offers one—tested across world wars, pandemics, depressions, and the digital dawn. It’s not about living longer; it’s about living better while everything changes around you.

Von Drehle traces Charlie’s composure to a brutal lesson at age eight: his father, a minister-turned–insurance agent, was crushed by an elevator and fell nine stories to his death. The boy didn’t spend his life asking “Why?”—he learned to tell the difference between what he could control (his response, his duties, his outlook) and what he couldn’t (accidents, time, other people). That distinction—central to Stoicism from Epictetus to Marcus Aurelius—became Charlie’s operating system.

Learning the Stoic split early

After the funeral, Charlie couldn’t eat. Yet his mother, Laura, quietly handed him responsibility: manage the coal; stoke the fire at 4 a.m.; care for the yard. She told him, “You are the man of the house now,” then gave him room to self-direct—famously allowing him to sleep outdoors on a porch for an entire year because he decided to. Her approach (“guided by not guiding”) taught him decisive action and confidence: act where you can, accept what you can’t. (Viktor Frankl would later call this the last of human freedoms: the power to choose your attitude.)

Resilience by doing, not brooding

The American Psychological Association’s advice for post-trauma resilience—take decisive actions, cultivate support, reframe crises—maps closely to Charlie’s boyhood. Sent to a ramshackle “Boy Crusaders” camp (where teens were later alleged to have been abused), he came home browned, toughened, and tight-lipped about pain: not from repression alone, but from a deliberate refusal to “carry it as baggage.” He hopped off a slow train near Martin City and found his own way home—an eight-year-old applying the principle, “Do what’s next.”

Charlie’s rule in practice

Let go of neighbor drama and grudges. “I don’t have time for people like that,” he told his daughter. Then hold on to your purpose and next step. Two beats, one rhythm.

Courage is choice, not absence of fear

When Pearl Harbor shattered the peace, Charlie faced a different fear: volunteering could kill his practice and maybe his marriage. He resigned the reserves in frustration, then judged himself “chicken,” reapplied, and served as an Air Force physician. Psychologist S. J. Rachman defines courage as acting despite the urge to flee; Charlie’s choice fits. He didn’t deny risk—he faced it. (Compare to Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way, which popularizes Stoic action under pressure.)

A two-word philosophy you can use

In scene after scene, Charlie distills Stoicism into two imperatives you can test today: “Let it go,” and “Hold on.” Let go of the illusion of control over people, status, and fate. Hold on to your standards, effort, and humor. When an octogenarian golf buddy got stuck in a bunker, Charlie—well into his 90s—laughed so hard he could barely stand. He wasn’t mocking misfortune; he was choosing joy over complaint. That cultivated cheer is itself a form of discipline—fuel for the next hard thing.

Why this matters for you

Every career and relationship forces you to decide what to release and what to grip. The more you confuse the two—obsessing over outcomes you can’t dictate while neglecting actions you can—the more anxious and brittle you become. Charlie’s lifelong calm wasn’t temperament alone; it was a practiced rhythm. Try it on something small today—an inbox pile, a tense meeting, a parenting spiral—and scale from there.

Charlie didn’t merely endure change—he befriended it. As a teenager, he leaned into the automobile revolution: with classmates Bob Long and future China correspondent Edgar Snow, he drove a 1917 Model T from Kansas City to Los Angeles on rutted dirt tracks with a fencepost-and-hemlock guidebook. They harvested Kansas wheat to fund the trip, poured soda pop into an overheated radiator in the Arizona desert, and, short on cash, stowed away atop a passenger train through the Sierra Nevada. That “Unconscious Three” odyssey taught him a permanent lesson: when the map is messy, keep moving.

Learn fast, with joy

Radio exploded while Charlie was in high school—WDAF’s late-night broadcasts of the Coon-Sanders Nighthawk Orchestra turned the Midwest into a jazz-soaked classroom. Charlie bought a used tenor sax and taught himself by playing along to the midnight signal. Within two years he had a 300-song repertoire and was earning tuition money at sorority tea dances and theater gigs. Change wasn’t a threat; it was a teacher. (Think of Cal Newport’s “career capital” mindset: stack rare and valuable skills as the landscape shifts.)

Act first, figure it out as you go

The pattern repeats: as a broke med student in Chicago, he pulled ambulance shifts and once attempted an arm-to-arm transfusion to save a mobster (primitive by today’s standards, but courageous). When a trans-Pacific cruise line needed a band, he booked one and then used a gangster’s girlfriend’s cash—tipped for that failed transfusion—to buy a train ticket to Seattle. He diarized ports from Yokohama to Manila to Hong Kong, then made it back to classes. He didn’t wait for perfect conditions; he made the next workable move.

Reinvent your relationship to technology

For Charlie, new tools became playmates: he filled his living room with an animatronic Santa year-round because it delighted him; he treated airplane gas rations during WWII as tickets to ski Alta every weekend; he cherished the first time he navigated by radio beacons and the last time he played his sax at 95. The posture matters. If you meet technology with curiosity rather than dread, your options multiply. (Walter Isaacson’s biographies—from Edison to Jobs—underline the same creative posture toward the new.)

Practical takeaways for your next transition

• Prototype your future. Charlie didn’t decide to be a musician; he tried gigs until they paid his tuition. Run small bets before big leaps.
• Translate change into adventure. Label the unknown as a story you’ll tell (driving Raton Pass in first gear, pushing the Model T by hand) and your fear loses power.
• Travel light on identity. Charlie wasn’t “a general practitioner” or “a musician” or “an anesthesiologist.” He was a learner. That identity travels.

If you’re standing at a career or life crossroad, Charlie’s bias is a nudge: move. You can steer a rolling car; it’s hard to steer one in park.

Medicine changed underneath Charlie’s feet. He trained in an era of mustard plasters, mercury, cocaine for colds, and improvised “autogenous vaccines.” He made house calls with ether in a can, set fractures by feel, and bartered treatments during the Depression—taking payment in eggs, tires, and once an 1890 Encyclopaedia Britannica. He watched quacks like Norman Baker and “Goat Gland” Brinkley exploit radio to sell false cures. Then, almost at once, penicillin arrived and anesthesiology professionalized—upending the generalist, house-call model that defined his early career.

See the inflection point

Charlie could have clung to the old ways. Instead, he recognized that antibiotics plus modern surgery meant the future belonged to specialists. Wartime accelerated that shift. The Army Air Forces sent him to the Mayo Clinic for a three-month crash course under John S. Lundy, a founder of modern anesthesia. Charlie returned as chief anesthesiologist at Lincoln AAF and then became one of Kansas City’s earliest anesthesiologists. The difference was night and day: from bedside hand-holding to airway management, nerve blocks, endotracheal intubations, and pharmacologic finesse.

Innovate with what you have

Before heart-lung machines, Charlie helped pioneer open-heart procedures by hypothermia: he bought a farm horse tank, packed patients in ice to thicken blood and slow flow, then had surgeons quickly split adhesions on stenotic mitral valves with a finger and stitch back up. “We never lost a patient,” he recalled. It’s iterative problem-solving—build the bridge while you cross it. (This echoes the IID—iterative and incremental development—ethos in tech.)

Career pivots as a habit

He didn’t just pivot once. He pivoted repeatedly: generalist to anesthesiologist; local doc to international trouble-shooter (numbing the hand of Peru’s president, Manuel Odría, while White House physician Wally Graham operated); clinician to organizer (founding the regional anesthesiology society). The throughline is a willingness to re-skill fast when the world gives new constraints and opportunities.

Your playbook for upheaval

• Spot the signal. Antibiotics weren’t a blip; they rewired the job-to-be-done in medicine. What’s your field’s equivalent (AI, automation, regulation)?
• Re-skill with velocity. Charlie became a “90-day wonder” at Mayo. Compress learning intently, then learn the rest on the job.
• Prototype solutions. A horse tank is inelegant—and effective. Favor useful over perfect.

Change doesn’t ask permission. Neither should your pivot.

Throughout the book, Charlie’s instinct is to do the next useful thing with what’s at hand. That habit—more than vision boards or five-year plans—propels him through crises and opens doors. You can practice the same muscle.

Make a move with what you’ve got

Stuck in the desert with a burned-out wheel bearing? He waited hours until a farmer in a Model T arrived—who’d had the same failure and carried a spare. When the radiator boiled dry, the boys poured in soda until they limped to a store. Broke and hungry in Oakland during a railroad strike? Charlie and Ed Snow took busboy jobs feeding replacement crews inside retrofitted dining cars, pocketed $3/day plus meals, then caught a freight east across the Black Rock Desert—hiding on a cowcatcher when a brakeman flushed them from the roof.

Improvise, don’t idolize tools

On a house call for a winter-sick child, Charlie knocked the family picture off the wall, harvested its wire, flame-sterilized it, and used it as a tonsil snare when he discovered his own loop was missing. In a pasture, he paralyzed a racehorse with Anectine just enough to keep it upright, then ventilated it with a fireplace bellows while an orthopedist stitched ligaments. Triage trumped theatrics.

Lower the friction to act

He gamed small systems to keep moving forward. At the railyard he smuggled overalls past strikers by wearing white flannel trousers and “office boy” vibes. He turned a free apartment at Villa Serena into a patient pipeline by offering himself as the building’s on-call physician. He learned every dark street in Kansas City and mounted a police-style spotlight on his car to find addresses faster at night.

Mistakes as tuition

Charlie wasn’t precious about error. He invested in the wrong things (passed on Aspen and on Ewing Kauffman’s early pharma venture), broke the wrong teeth during difficult intubations, then handed patients $25 to fix the damage. He called those misses “a good laugh,” not identity verdicts. (Niels Bohr: “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”)

Your resourcefulness checklist

• Ask: What’s the next smallest action that moves reality?
• Use constraints as creativity prompts—what can substitute?
• Treat mistakes as data; pay the price, adjust, continue.

If you’re waiting for the perfect tool or timing, you’re waiting to live. Charlie chose motion.

Charlie’s joie de vivre isn’t cute color—it’s central to his resilience. He laughs when his octogenarian golf partner can’t climb out of a sand trap. He keeps an animatronic Santa in his living room year-round. He plays sax at his 95th birthday. He basks in romance with a glamorous widow, Mary Ann Cooper, in his nineties; together they hold hands at Blue Hills Country Club and tease the neighbor to “take your wife out—without kids!” These aren’t quirks but practices: choosing delight where pain is absent, so you have fuel when pain returns.

Optimism as energy source

“If you’re negative, your whole body suffers,” Charlie said. He wasn’t denying darkness; he was refusing to marinate in it. When Lois, the love of his late life, rang a bell upstairs near the end, he ran without complaint. When Mary Ann’s memory dimmed, he sat by her side and sang. When hallucinations (likely Charles Bonnet syndrome) painted cartoon visitors in his den at 107, he chuckled, “You don’t see it, because it isn’t there,” and carried on. He protected cheer like a scarce resource.

Beauty on purpose

Charlie looked for wonder: the jeweled lights of Electric Park; the spray of Victoria Falls (a TWA pilot dipped under the clouds so he could see it up close); dolphins off a Pacific liner as he read Philip Gibbs; the sunrise color on the Royal Gorge sky as he and Ed Snow rode a Missouri Pacific flatcar. You can audit your day the same way—name the beautiful—and watch your threshold for gratitude drop.

Practice, don’t posture

Charlie sermonized less and ritualized more. He kept breakfast appointments with a doctors’ club well past 100; he attended grand rounds to the end; he washed girlfriends’ cars at 102; he wrote a final page of life maxims at 109. Joy here is behavioral: repeated, embodied choices that tilt mood upward. (Compare to Tal Ben-Shahar’s work on “happiness as habits.”)

A simple creed

Work hard. Spread joy. Take a chance. Enjoy wonder. Keep your daubers up.

If you want resilience that lasts longer than a pep talk, make delight a discipline—on purpose, every day.

Conscience and heartbreak shape Charlie’s middle decades. He practices medicine in Tom Pendergast’s corrupt Kansas City machine, refuses kickbacks tied to hospital admissions, and loses privileges at the public hospital. He treats Little Italy’s wounded without judging, even as mob boss Johnny Lazia’s shadows fall across his ambulance routes. He delivers babies in cramped rooms for $25 in federal stipends during the Depression, keeps a premature two-pound girl alive in a cotton-lined shoebox by a lamp and an eyedropper—and later removes her tonsils at five. His ethic—“Do the right thing”—was Laura White’s legacy made flesh.

Marriage under strain

The book doesn’t varnish personal pain. His first wife, Mildred, fights alcoholism and likely an eating disorder, cycles through the Menninger Clinic, and dies by suicide at the Gladstone Hotel—registered under a false name with a companion the night before. The police hand back her wedding ring and Bulova watch. Charlie tells the story without rancor, only regret and baffled grief. Love doesn’t guarantee rescue; doing right sometimes still hurts.

A misfit second try

His second marriage to WASP pilot Jean Landis—who ferried P-51 Mustangs in WWII and circled the Statue of Liberty on her last flight—fizzles fast. Jean later says Charlie, wounded by loss, tried to track her every hour; she was too independent. They part kindly; years on, she receives the Congressional Gold Medal with fellow WASPs and remembers him as “a gentleman.”

A late partnership and the long goodbye

He marries Lois Grimshaw and becomes an “instant dad” to her children, then a father to two more daughters. They fish the Fryingpan River; golf; garden; build a playhouse. Charlie is exuberant but hands-off as a parent, distilling guidance to mantras: “Do what’s right.” “Do your best.” “Keep your daubers up.” When Lois gets cancer, Charlie aches that she “gave up,” yet he serves faithfully to the end. Decades later he loves Mary Ann with the same gusto.

Why this matters

Doing right won’t insulate you from sorrow. But it protects your character—your one true asset—so you can keep loving and choosing even after losses. In a world that tempts you to trade integrity for ease, Charlie’s costlier path proves more durable.

Many of Charlie’s bravest choices are recommitments rather than first leaps. He doesn’t just join the Army Air Forces; after resigning in frustration when a promised hospital isn’t built, he judges himself harshly, then signs up again after Pearl Harbor—knowing it may wreck his practice. Courage here is not Hollywood bravado; it’s a quiet return to duty after doubt.

Name the real risk

For Charlie, the physical risk of service was real, but the graver risk was career annihilation. A fee-for-service doctor without employer safety nets, he could lose patients permanently. He chose to serve anyway, then wrung opportunity from it—getting unlimited gas rations to ski Alta, yes, but also discovering a specialty he’d love for life.

Courage in small, daily forms

He shows up to hard places: gunfights outside Little Italy rowhouses; pneumonia wards before antibiotics; crowded parlors where a mom asks if he’ll “take all the kids’ tonsils at once” for a discount. He returns after mistakes; he keeps dating after losing partners; he keeps attending grand rounds after 100. Courage isn’t a one-time act; it’s a practiced pattern of re-upping.

How to build yours

• Admit the fear (career loss, reputation, failure) and act anyway on principle.
• Recommit after you waver; the second yes counts double.
• Borrow perspective: “This will pass.” Then take the next step.

Courage looks less like a movie and more like a calendar: steady choices over time.

A striking lesson in the book is how frequently Charlie advances by rough draft. He ties a suicide-attempt patient’s swollen tongue to the bed with silk to prevent aspiration—crude, lifesaving, temporary. He learns endotracheal techniques, then refines. He ices heart patients in a horse trough—temporary—until heart-lung machines mainstream open-heart surgery. He books a cruise-ship band as a med student—rough—then learns what he needs at sea. Forward, then better.

IID in real life

Charlie embodies “iterative and incremental development,” the same philosophy that built the software you use daily. Don’t wait for perfect knowledge to act; take the smallest responsible step, gather feedback, improve. His Mayo training as a “90-day wonder” is a masterclass in compressed iteration: learn essentials deeply; apply them broadly; learn the rest on cases.

Prototype identity, too

Even identities are drafts. Charlie tries “musician,” “general practitioner,” “anesthesiologist,” “organizer,” “mission doctor,” “adventurer with a monkey in the car.” He never fossilizes into a single definition. If you’re stuck, prototype a role on nights and weekends; if it fits, expand. (Design Thinking’s “test-and-learn” is this, applied to self.)

Practical applications

• Ship a sketch, not a symphony—get feedback faster.
• Create safety valves—like Charlie’s bedside $25 for dental chips—to keep learning relationships alive.
• Retire methods, not missions. The horse tank ends; saving hearts continues.

You don’t need certainty to improve your tomorrow. You need your first, best draft—and the humility to write a second.

Late in life, living at Claridge Court, Charlie wrote a single page of imperatives—his distillate after 109 years. They read like well-worn tools you can pocket. Think freely. Practice patience. Smile often. Savor special moments. Make and keep friends. Tell loved ones how you feel. Forgive and seek forgiveness. Feel deeply. Observe miracles. Make them happen. Be soft sometimes. Cry when you need to. Make some mistakes. Learn from them. Keep your daubers up.

Simple isn’t shallow

Von Drehle suggests that a well-led life has two halves. First, we complexify—learn how messy the world is. Then, if we live long enough, we simplify—boil action down to clear behaviors we can actually do. Charlie’s mother’s charge—“Do the right thing”—isn’t trite; it’s a navigational North Star. Emerson’s counsel to live “in the present, above time” fits beside Marcus Aurelius’s advice to accept fate’s hand—and play it well.

Build rituals around maxims

Charlie didn’t frame these lines on a wall; he enacted them. He met friends for breakfast. He attended grand rounds. He washed a girlfriend’s car at 102. He flew to Haiti at 99. He kept a Santa singing in August. If a maxim doesn’t translate into a calendar block or a repeated behavior, it isn’t yet yours.

Two anchors for you

• “This will pass.” Use it to shrink catastrophizing and reclaim agency.
• “Keep your daubers up.” Whether you picture a muddy wasp’s raised tail or a painter’s lifted brush, it’s posture: alert, hopeful, ready to work.

If you need a pocket philosophy for the next hard week, borrow Charlie’s. Then make it your own—by doing it.