Under a Wing: A Memoir

Title: Under a Wing: A Memoir
Author: Lindbergh, Reeve
ISBN: 9780684807706
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1998
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Condition: Used: Very Good
Clean, unmarked copy with some edge wear. Good binding. Dust jacket included if issued with one. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.

F 1551216

Publisher Description:
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 also famous, the author of the bestselling "Gift from the Sea" and other books. But Reeve Lindbergh knew them as Father and Mother. Their celebrity status and the tragedy of their first child shadowed the Lindbergh family in ways that were often mysterious to the five surviving children. In this moving, deeply affecting memoir, the youngest of the children describes what it was like to grow up as a Lindbergh.

Charles Lindbergh was a stern, strong father who inspired both love and fear. As a pilot, he owed his life to careful preparation; he was methodical and exacting as a parent. He wrote lists of topics to discuss with each child (his "Downfall of Civilization" lecture addressed "air conditioning, television, politics, [and] Pop Art"). When he drove, he never exceeded the speed limit, and when he skied, he never advanced beyond the beginner slopes. He stressed self-reliance and independence, the virtues that had made him who he was. He tried to teach all his children to fly, and Reeve recalls a memorable flight that ended in an emergency landing and revealed her father's true character: "My father wasn't flying the airplane, he was being the airplane. That's how he did it. That's how he had always done it."

Anne Morrow, by contrast, was a gentler and more accessible parent. She encouraged her children to write, taught them to love nature, and would relax the rules in her husband's absence. Reeve writes movingly about the night her life and her mother's converged, when Reeve's first son died unexpectedly, and her mother urged Reeve to sit beside her infant's body. As the two women kept vigil together, Reeve realized that her mother had never had the opportunity to grieve in this way over the loss of her firstborn son. In a deeply moving chapter, Reeve writes about how the effects of several s