Lindbergh [Hardcover]

A. Scott Berg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 21, 1998

Bestselling author and National Book Awardwinner A. Scott Berg is the first and only writer to be 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unpublished letters and diaries--and to be allowed freely to interview Lindbergh's friends, colleagues, and family members, including his children and his widow, Anne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 brilliant 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 on an odyssey for which he was ill-prepared--becoming 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 the aviator's character; the astonishing transatlantic flight and thrilling, then overwhelming aftermath; the controversies surrounding the trial of his son's kidnapper, Lindbergh's fascination with Hitler's Germany and his leadership of America First; his remarkable unsung work in the fields of medical research, rocketry, anthropology, and conservation; and, at the heart of it all, his fascinating, complex marriage to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a relationship filled with sudden joy and bitter darkness. In all, it is a most compelling story of a most significant life--the most private of public figures finally revealed with a sweep and detail never before possible. In the skilled hands of A. Scott Berg, this is Lindbergh the hero--and Lindbergh the man.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Charles Lindbergh's solo flight from New York to Paris captured the imagination of a postwar generation hungry for heroes, and cemented an exalted spot for the 25-year-old pilot from Minnesota in the collective American imagination. A. Scott Berg's thorough new biography of the aviator suggests that despite the public scrutiny that accompanied his every move until his death in 1974, Lindbergh remained an intensely private man. The son of ill-matched parents who separated when he was 6, he was painfully shy and emotionally guarded. "Aviation created a brotherhood of casual acquaintances ... in which he felt comfortable," writes Berg with characteristic perceptiveness.

Lindbergh's wife, the writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh, gave Berg unrestricted access to her husband's and her own voluminous personal papers--and he made good use of them to assess both the couple's relationship and their activities. Probably the most startling revelation is a brief but candid discussion of Anne's affair in the late 1950s with a New Jersey doctor, which helped assuage her need to vent emotions in a way her buttoned-up husband found insupportable. (During the horrendous days in 1932 when their 20-month-old son was kidnapped and killed, Berg notes, she never once saw Charles cry.) The biography is solid on all aspects of Lindbergh's career, including his notorious urging that America stay out of World War II; Berg rebuts charges that Lindbergh was a Nazi or a traitor, but rightly criticizes the anti-Semitism latent in some of his speeches. With this book, Berg succeeds in surveying Lindbergh's fascinating life and assessing its historic impact.

From 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. Photos. (Sept.) FYI: Putnam was said to have paid a seven-figure advance for Lindbergh in 1990.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult (September 21, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399144498
• ISBN-13: 978-0399144493
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (148 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #835,355 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #18 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( L ) > Lindbergh, Charles

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, Cautionary Tale Of The Price Of Fame & Fortune!, August 12, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lindbergh (Hardcover)

From the moment his wheels touched ground at Orly Airport in Paris in May of 1927, Charles Lindbergh's life started on an incredible second journey over which he often seemed to have little guidance or control, a whirlwind life spent in the suffocating death-grasp of public attention. In this wonderful biography by A. Scott Berg, we are invited to take this momentous ride alongside "Lucky Lindy" from his birth and early beginnings to his efforts to gain fame and recognition by becoming the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic. Yet in a way totally unanticipated by the enigmatic and somewhat naïve Lindbergh, this was only the beginning of an incredible life. For in accomplishing this spellbinding feat, to this brilliantly enterprising young man's amazement, the fame and fortune he had so eagerly sought to achieve soon took control over the direction and destiny of his life.

This is a book full of surprising twists and turns, and the reader is led on an entertaining and exotic excursion unto the interior of a marvelously complicated man's life, as well as into the realities of the story-book romance with his beautiful young wife, the former Anne Morrow, an ambassador's daughter. Their courtship and marriage fueled the public's imagination, and they became figures that loomed larger than life in the tabloid journalism of the early 1930s. Lindbergh found himself fashioned into the first modern day media superstar, a person so celebrated and famous it sometimes seems he spent the balance of his life's energy trying to escape such attention. As a result of his own personal qualities and frailties, and his uneasy and sometimes uncomprehending place in American spotlight, he was both deified and demonized in the public press again and again.

Each event in his all-too public personal odyssey is examined here, from the trip into fame and fortune aboard the "Spirit of Saint Louis" to his romance and marriage to Anne Morrow, from their life in the spotlight to the incredible ordeal of the kidnapping and death of their infant son, which resulted in the most celebrated and controversial trials and subsequent executions in modern American history. Berg examines the evidence of the kidnapping, which eventually led to the Lindberghs fleeing for their sanity sake on an odyssey taking them to England, an island off the coast of France, and to Nazi Germany, where Lindbergh's fascination with Hitler's regime and technical prowess led him to eventual political adventurism of his own with the "America First" movement. In unsuccessfully challenging Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lindbergh lost both his public credibility and cache, becoming vilified in the press for his questionable political views and dubious patriotism.

When war came Lindbergh was flatly refused any active role, but eventually found himself a way into the fracas first as a commercial test pilot, and later as an unofficial pilot in the South Pacific, where he performed brilliantly as a combat pilot with over fifty missions to his credit. After the war he became involved in a number of environmental, humanitarian, and medical issues, and devoted himself to anonymous public service, purposefully hidden from popular scrutiny and public view. In his strange and eclectic odyssey, he had caught public imagination, but had kept his own complexities and personal demons hidden from view. Lindbergh is in many ways a tragic figure, a person tripped by fate into being believed as a figure bigger than life, when in fact he was unequal to the task. He was, after all, only human, and tragically so at that. This is a fascinating and entertaining book about one of the most enigmatic and puzzling figures in 20th century history. I highly recommend it.

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly fascinating -- an absorbing page-turner., January 30, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Lindbergh (Paperback)

The author presents a thorough, vivid, balanced and very readable history of the events and times of Charles Lindbergh's life (which spanned a considerable era, from the Wright Brothers to the moon landings) as well as a perceptive, in-depth, flesh and blood portrait of the man, his personal and family life, and his career.Thanks to the copious and detailed written record that the Lindberghs kept of their experiences -- made available to Mr. Berg in addition to all his other research -- the book gave this baby boomer a riveting glimpse into the half of the Twentieth Century which I was born too late to witness. There was truly a "you are there" feel to accounts of the famous flight, the kidnapping, the trial, the couple's marriage, the birth of commercial and military aviation, the events leading up to World War II, and even Lindbergh's passing as they were unfolding. There was also a very real and intimate depiction of Charles and Anne as people through the various stages of their lives.It was enlightening that public craziness and media frenzy hardly began with Princess Di and O.J. It was also quite revealing of the times that Anne so unquestioningly suppressed aspects of herself to support her husband and his endeavors even though she was an educated and independent woman with separate needs which were quite often at odds with his.If anyone thinks this book would not interest them, they should think again. A very worthwhile read in many respects. Definitely deserved the Pulitzer Prize.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lucky Lindy? - You Be The Judge, February 25, 2003

By 

Kenneth Blum (Orrville, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lindbergh (Paperback)

So how did a farm boy from the backwoods of Minnesota become one of the most revered heroes in world history?

Perhaps no book written about the ice-veined, brilliant aviator Charles A. Lindbergh answers this question better than A. Scott Berg's "Lindbergh", a marvelous, smoothly-written biography that uses heretofore unavailable sources to chronicle the unimaginable ups and equally unimaginable downs of Mr. Lindbergh's life.

The book is the first biography of Lindbergh that was written with the input and blessing of Lindbergh's family, including his widow, the noted author Anne Morrow Lindbergh. For the first time, the family granted unrestricted access to masses of material in the Lindbergh archives.

After reading this book, one concludes that two extreme forces shaped this great man's destiny.

The first was flight, taking off with his days as a barnstormer and airmail pilot, soaring with his courageous solo in a monoplane across the Atlantic, and coming to a soft but significant landing with the endeavors of his later life that involved not only aviation, but innovative projects in the fields of medicine and environmentalism. He also distinguished himself as an author (with, I suspect, the assistance of his wife, Anne, herself a talented writer.) In 1954, "The Spirit of St. Louis" the book won the Pulitzer Prize. It remains one of this country's most compelling, true-life adventure stories.

The second force was fame, the scourge of this extremely private man's life. Keep in mind that this was no normal fame, but a fame that bordered on fanaticism. It was fame that directly related to the kidnapping and death of his infant son, the family's exile to Europe, and the scorching criticism directed Lindbergh's way for his anti-war stance in the years preceding World War 11.

And although Mr. Berg's book was written with the cooperation of the Lindbergh family, it doesn't gloss over the consequences of his remote personality and long absences from home. Both had much to do with Anne Morrow Lindbergh's love affair with her doctor.

Some day, I hope that an ambitious television network such as HBO creates a mini-series based on this captivating biography. There is no way that a single movie can do justice to the expanse of dramatic events and stunning accomplishments that made up the life of America's greatest hero.

Here was a man. And here's a biography that does him proud.