Another good Lindbergh book, this time from the youngest daughter of the aviator and Anne Morrow.
Gives another perspective on the family. Well-written. ( )

memoir of growing up as the daughter of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

5806 Under a Wing A Memoir, by Reeve Lindbergh (read 21 Oct 2022) I had this book and decided to read it because I wanted to see what the author, the youngest of Charles Lindbergh's legitimate children (born in 1945), had to say about her father's German bastards. The book was published in 1998, before the existence of said children was known to the author. The book details the autocratic behavior of Lindbergh in the family's life and how, when his daughter learned of her father's infamous Des Moines speech , she effectively deprecates same for its anti-Semitic tenor. One cannot blame his daughter for her admiration for her parents but she sees her father's errors and the Wikipedia article on her shows she was duly bothered by his devious and despicable actions. ( )

Mine is a signed copy by Reeve at the 2002 75th Anniversary Lindbergh expo in Little Falls, MN.

This is a gem of a book. After reading the Aviator's Wife I was hungry for more info on the Lindberghs and my library search turned up this. Written by the youngest Lindbergh child, Reeve, it is not a linear account, but a true memoir of impressions and memories of growing up with such famous parents and under the shadow of a tragedy. I knew of her as a children's author, but was excited to find this book for adults. She writes beautifully and poetically about the "give-and-take between public impression and private memory, each informing, educating, correcting and ultimately humanizing the other, over time. . . I have learned that by pursing my own history consistently, pursuing it with compassion and without fear, I will discover over and over again that the people I love best can never be lost to me." (195) This book was written in 1998, 20 years after her father's death, and during her mother's slow decline to old age (she died in 2001). Reeve looks at her childhood from the impressionable view of a child, complete with smells, feelings and spatial memory of favorite places and memories of favorite people. She also looks at family dynamics and the sheer force of her father's will ("in his presence we became much more completely and perilously alive") and her mother's intelligence and sensitivity. ("she taught us that any experience worth living through was worth writing about") She also shares her close relationship with her siblings, especially Anne, who died at age 59 from cancer. The importance of place and family identity is explored beautifully and she does not shy away from difficult topics (Charles Lindbergh's perceived antisemitism in WWII, for example) but she also accurately catches the distance a child feels from the life and actions of an adult parent, especially things that happened before her birth. The same goes for the kidnapping. The family resisted letting that define them, to the betterment of all the subsequent children. The title is so apt, as is the cover picture that it predisposed me to a pleasant read and I wasn't disappointed. ( )