Lindbergh

A. Scott Berg spent close to a decade on this biography after securing an extraordinary grant of access from Charles Lindbergh's widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh: more than two thousand boxes of family papers, along with sixty years of her own diaries, that no previous biographer had been allowed to see in full. The book follows Lindbergh from a boyhood in Little Falls, Minnesota and a brief engineering education at Wisconsin he abandoned for flying, through barnstorming work as a wing walker and parachutist across the Great Plains, and into the airmail runs between St. Louis and Chicago he was flying when he decided to compete for the Orteig Prize, offered for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris.

Berg gives the May 1927 flight itself close, hour by hour treatment: the modified monoplane built to Lindbergh's specifications, the thirty three and a half hours alone over open ocean navigating by dead reckoning, and the landing at Le Bourget that turned an unknown airmail pilot into instantly the most famous man in the world, greeted by a crowd Berg describes overrunning the airfield. The book follows the fame that consumed him afterward, then the 1932 kidnapping and murder of his infant son, a tragedy so exhaustively covered by the press that it drove the family to Europe for years.

Berg does not soften Lindbergh's isolationist activism with the America First Committee before Pearl Harbor or the antisemitic remarks in his 1941 Des Moines speech that badly damaged his standing, treating them as part of the record rather than an embarrassing footnote, while also following his combat missions as a civilian consultant in the Pacific and his later work as a conservationist. Reading the biography means watching genuine heroism and genuine failure sit inside one long American life, and it suits a reader who wants Lindbergh's full complexity rather than either the golden boy of 1927 or the isolationist of 1941 alone.