If you want a complete portrait of one of the greatest but most controversial heroes of modern times, you can do no better than Scott Berg's outstanding biography Lindbergh (1998)(read Orrin's review, Grade: A+). But if you want to understand what made the Lone Eagle an iconic figure in the first place, you should really read his own Pulitzer Prize winning account of his 3600 mile, solo, trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927.
The caricature of Lindbergh that has been passed down to us in popular history is so negative that I'd always sort of assumed that this book must have been written in the immediate afterglow of his trip. And, naturally I assumed that it must have been ghostwritten, a la Profiles in Courage. In fact, he had written a hasty take on the trip entitled We years earlier, but had never been satisfied with it. So over a period of more than ten years, starting in 1939, he wrote and rewrote numerous drafts of a more detailed account, incorporating suggestions from his wife and his editor, stripping away excess verbiage and making his prose more direct until finally in the last drafts he switched the whole narrative from past tense to present.
The final result is a surpassingly exciting day to day and moment by moment recreation of the immense effort that went into gathering investors, building the plane and planning the trip and then a detailed recounting of the trip itself. The whole suffused by Lindbergh's extraordinary vision and his supreme sense of mission.
As we recede further from the events of his life and the miraculous
achievements of the pioneers of aviation lose their luster while the dark
deeds of Nazi Germany lose none of their theirs, it seems likely that Lindbergh's
legacy will come to consist of little more than isolationism mingled with
the faint fetor of antiSemitism. This would be really unfair to the
man, who for all his faults was much too complex and interesting a character
to warrant this fate. If nothing else, one hopes this terrific book
will survive and continue to find an audience; it certainly deserves to
(Reviewed:09-Feb-00)
Grade: (A+)
