Lindbergh FROM OUR EDITORS
Charles Lindbergh is at once one of the century's best-known and most misunderstood figures. In Lindbergh, bestselling author and National Book Award winner A. Scott Berg lifts the veil of myth and mystery that has surrounded the aviator since his moment of triumph on May 21, 1927, when he landed in Paris, the first person to cross the Atlantic alone in an airplane. It's an insightful look at a remarkable life.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
National Book Award winner A. Scott Berg is the first and only writer to have been given unrestricted access to the massive Lindbergh archives - more than two thousand boxes of personal papers, including reams of unpublished letters and diaries - and to be allowed freely to interview Lindbergh's friends, colleagues, and family members, including his children and his widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The result is a biography that clarifies a life long blurred by myth and half-truth. From the moment he landed in Paris on May 21, 1927, Lindbergh found himself thrust upon an odyssey for which he was ill prepared - the first modern media superstar, deified and demonized many times over in a single lifetime. Berg casts dramatic new light on the lonely, sometimes twisted childhood that formed his character; the astonishing flight and thrilling, then overwhelming aftermath; the controversies surrounding the trial of his son's accused kidnapper; the storm over Lindbergh's fascination with Hitler's Germany and over his active role in the isolationist America First movement; and his remarkable unsung work devoted to medical research, rocketry, anthropology, and conservation. At the heart of it all is his fascinating, complex marriage with Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a relationship far from the storybook romance the public imagined, one filled with sudden joy and bitter darkness, and which forged her into one of the century's leading feminist voices. Berg exposes the many facets of the private Lindbergh, including his ingenious medical work with Dr. Alexis Carrel, developing the precursor to an artificial heart; his pioneering support of rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard; his soul-searching visit to Camp Dora at Bergen-Belsen; his life with the primitive Masai tribe in Africa, and his discovery of the Tasaday in the Philippines; his fight to save the whales off the coasts of Japan and Peru; and his deeply moving final days in Maui, where he supervised the digging of his own grave.
SYNOPSIS
Charles A. Lindbergh is at once one of the century's best-known and most misunderstood figures. In his fascinating new biography, Lindbergh, betselling author and National Book Award winner A. Scott Berg lifts the veil of myth and mystery that has surrounded the aviator since his moment of triumph on May 21, 1927, when he landed in Paris, the first person to cross the Atlantic alone in an airplane. Berg is the first author to be given unrestricted access to the massive Lindbergh archives -- more than 2,000 boxes of personal papers, including reams of unpublished letters and diaries -- and to be allowed to freely interview Lindbergh's friends, colleagues, and family members, including his children and widow. It's an insightful look at a remarkable life.
FROM THE CRITICS
Entertainment Weekly
...[S]harply focused...
Anthony Bianco - Business Week
. . .Berg for the most part makes artful use of his treasure-trove [of archives]....But the reader would have been better served [with] more trenchant analysis of his often compounding subject.
Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times
Often thrilling, but disturbingly opaque, Mr. Berg's [book] turns that historic flight into a narrative tour de force...that conveys...all the magic, danger and courage of the young pilot's achievement....In the end, Mr. Berg's depiction of Lindbergh as 'naive in war as he had been in peace' is insufficient....It is a serious flaw...that cast a dark shadow over [a] dazzling writerly achievement...
John J. Miller - National Review
A. Scott Berg never mythologizes Charles Lindbergh, but he understandably admires him. With honesty and style, he performs the important task of reviving this flawed but essential figure, a true American hero.
Publishers Weekly
Lindbergh, writes Berg, was "the most celebrated living person ever to walk the earth." It's a brash statement for a biography that makes its points through a wealth of fact rather than editorial (or psychological) surmise, but after the 1927 solo flight to Paris and the 1932 kidnapping of his infant son, most readers will agree. Berg (Max Perkins) writes with the cooperation, although not necessarily the approval, of the Lindbergh family, having been granted full access to the unpublished diaries and papers of both Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The result is a solidly written book that while revealing few new secrets (there are discoveries about Lindbergh's father's illegitimacy and Mrs. Lindbergh's 1956 affair with her doctor, Dana Atchley) instructs and fascinates through the richness of detail. There are no new insights into the boy flier, no new theories about the kidnapping, but there is a chilling portrait of a man who did not seem to enjoy many of the most basic human emotions. Perhaps more attention to Lindbergh's near-worship of the Nobel Prize-winning doctor, Alexis Carrel, would have explained more about his enigmatic character. Berg details Lindbergh's prewar trips to Nazi Germany at the request of the U.S. government; his leadership in the America First movement; his role in first promoting commercial aviation; and, during WWII, improving the efficiency of the Army Air Corps. As the book reaches its conclusion, however, it's the sympathetic portrait of Mrs. Lindbergh creating a life of her own while her husband chooses to be elsewhere that gives the biography the emotional scaffolding it lacked. The writing is workmanlike and efficient, and the story, familiar as it may be, encapsulates the history of the century.Read all 16 "From The Critics" >
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
Not My Hero
Frankly I must say that after finishing this book I was reminded of that famous quote about the lovely city of Oakland, only in this case it applied to subject Lindbergh. "Is there any there there.". My conclusion from reading this wonderfully written and detailed book is that Lindbergh could best be
described as a stick figure of a man, someone who could well have been cast in
one of those post WW2 black and white farmer brown cartoons. As a matter of
fact the only criticism of Mr. Berg that I have is that his obvious infatuation with Anne Morrow, who by all accounts was an almost noble and long-suffering soul, may have resulted in his occasionally incorrectly depicting Lindbergh as having several almost human like qualities. Lindbergh at his best was a narrow-minded, ill-tempered martinet. A cross, colorless bossy man given to keeping copious lists and to hassling his wife and children over mindless meaningless micro details. A man who spent an inordinate amount of time fretting over how he could get his kit packed into as small a suitcase as was humanly possible. I kid you not.
Yet I by no means wish to dismiss in any way his single great achievement.
However I do wonder whether this man, who strapped himself into a flimsy gas
filled monoplane, who, despite his lack of sleep the night before and facing
at least 36 hours of non-stop flight over the Atlantic ocean, could have
actually possessed the capacity to fear or worry about the consequences. As
the saying goes, " where there is no sense there can be no pain."
Charles Augustus Lindbergh is quite likely the best 20th century illustration
of what can occur in a nation obsessed with the cult of hero worship. He was I
submit the wrong man at the right time. Moreover, after being defrocked, after
being exposed as the mean spirited bigoted quasi-traitor that he was, he was
able, with the assistance of a cadre of America first, isolationist fellow
travelers and a few well meaning aviation fanatics, to rehabilitate or
recapture, to some measure, his good name and reputation despite his
unrepentant propensity for intolerance. It is with incredulity that I read and
reread many of his public utterances made on the eve of WW2. His absolute
indifference to the nazi torture of the Jews depicted in the context of his
behavior as a major nazi apologist and lapdog belie his subsequent claims that
he acted only out of his devotion for his country. After all, how many can say
they were the nazi's most decorated American.
To anyone who might in the future suggest that Herr Lindbergh was a complicated or possibly tormented figure I urge that they read this book. Mr. Berg overlays detail upon detail that, in their totality, depict this man for what I say he was. That is, a shallow, mean spirited, bigoted man who happened to have done a gloriously heroic deed over a 34-hour period once in his life. As his wife's close friend and teacher once observed, had he not flown the Atlantic, he probably would have operated a gas station on Long Island.
— Mitchell Alphonse Schwefel
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