Friday, July 5, 2013

The Aviator's Wife

The Aviator's Wife by Melanie Benjamin  402 pp.

This book is a very interesting fictionalized account of the 45 year marriage of aviator, Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Beginning with their first meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico when her father was the ambassador, Anne develops a crush on Lindbergh but believes he is interested in her much more glamorous sister, Elisabeth. After their marriage, Anne becomes a pilot, navigator, and radio operator for the couples many flights to all parts of the world. The couple were the first celebrity couple to suffer from constant hounding by the press and photographers, which increased after the kidnapping and death of their toddler son, Charles Jr. The marriage was not a particularly happy one after that. Lindbergh's antisemitism, belief in eugenics, and his Nazi sympathies compounded with his need to control everything and everyone in his family made him a less than stellar husband. Quite frankly, if Lindbergh was as awful as this book portrays him, I'm surprised Anne didn't push him out of the plane during one of their flights. The final revelation about the seven children he fathered with three different German women only reinforces the negative image of the "Great American Hero." According to the end notes the author based her account on the Lindberghs' own diaries and memoirs. Considering the fact that most of the private Lindbergh papers are sealed and housed at the Missouri History Museum Archive and only accessible with explicit permission of the Lindbergh heirs, I can't help but wonder how much is pure fiction. But that still doesn't explain a few inexplicable errors that jumped out at me including portraying the Apollo 11 flight to the moon in 1968 and the author's apparent confusion about just where in the body the gall bladder is located.

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