Under a Wing - Softcover

Lindbergh, Reeve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853719072 ISBN 13: 9781853719073

Publisher: Poolbeg Press, 2000

Synopsis

"We Lindberghs still know ourselves best as a tribe: close-knit, self-enclosed, and self-defining, always prepared to be besieged by invisible forces upwelling from the past...."

The world knew Charles Lindbergh as a daring aviator, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and controversial isolationist in World War II.  His wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was a bestselling author.  To their five children they were Father, never Daddy, and Mother.  Charles, a stern yet loving father, was surprisingly affectionate and playful; Anne provided a great, gentling love.  With remarkable candor, their youngest daughter provides a rare, intimate look at her legendary family...the pervasive impact of her brother's kidnapping and death...the complexity of her parents' long, loving marriage...the night her life and her mother's converged, as Reeve's own infant son died suddenly.  With grace and insight, Reeve Lindbergh appraises her remarkable parents, her unusual childhood, and the troubling questions that remain.  At once an eloquent reminiscence and a slice of American history, Under a Wing is, at its core, a heartfelt tribute to an extraordinary family.

About this title

Review

Reeve Lindbergh's memoir offers a uniquely intimate portrait of her family led by her intensely private father, aviator Charles Lindbergh, and mother, writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Under a Wing captures both her parents' complex personalities with immediacy and intimacy. Reeve explores the contrast between a loving father who "would parade imaginary animals across our backs" and the exacting patriarch who, upon return from his frequent absences, called each of his five children into his office to peruse a handwritten list of their achievements and failures. She seems anguished in her response to one of Charles's notorious, bigoted speeches: "How could someone who spoke the words my father did in 1941," she asks, "how did such a person then raise children who by his instruction and his example, day after day and year after year, had learned from him ... that such words were repellent and unspeakable?" She offers too a blunt but tender portrait of Anne in old age--she has been physically and mentally impaired by a series of stroke--that proves she has a mature understanding of a deeply loving woman who nonetheless always held some part of herself in reserve for her writing. This impressive memoir brings readers close to the private people within two legendary public figures.

From Kirkus Reviews

Published at almost the same time as A Scott Berg - s materful biography of Lindbergh, a sweetly moving memoir of growing up as the daughter of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The novelist (The Names of the Mountains, 1992, etc.) is the youngest of five Lindbergh children, all born after the tragic kidnapping of the famous couple's first-born son. Few knew the Lindberghs had such a large family, and that was how the family wanted to keep it. To escape publicity, they moved frequently, finally settling in an old stone house in Connecticut, where Reeve grew up after WWII. Her father traveled habitually, consulting for government and industry, but was a devoted - if domineering - parent when home, exercising ``affection and discipline in equal measure, often at the same time.'' Her mother was a quieter, less controlling presence; she wished to ``heal, soothe, and uplift us.'' Although Reeve learned little of her kidnapped brother, eventually she too lost a son when he was not yet two years old. Her mother sat with her by the little boy's body, and together they mourned the lost babies. After Charles Lindbergh died nearly 25 years ago, Reeve sought him out again in his boyhood home in Little Falls, Minn., now a state park site. She reflected there on how to reconcile public and private images of famous parents, as well as on the man who taught his children that intolerance was ``repellent and unspeakable'' - yet who himself wrote and uttered anti-Semitic statements. Anne Lindbergh, now in her 90s, suffering from the aftereffects of stroke, often doesn't recognize her daughter. Reeve writes about her mother's illness with sorrow, anger, humor, and acceptance. She also remembers her grandmothers, her siblings - especially her sister, who died of cancer five years ago - and pleasant summers in Maine. An eloquent recollection of a happy childhood in a tightly knit family whose parents' celebrity complicated but did not contort their lives. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Poolbeg Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1853719072
• ISBN 13: 9781853719073
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English