Lindbergh A Biography, Leonard Mosley. (Hardcover ) Used Book available for Swap

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Lindbergh A Biography
Author: Leonard Mosley

In the tawdry world of 1927, the bright sparks of the jazz age generation, in between boozing their way through the last months of the boom years, were apt to make overnight heroes of anyone who squatted longer on a pole, swallowed more goldfish, or gorged more frankfurters than anyone else had done before. — And now suddenly they were confronted... more » by the real thing, a genuine hero, who looked, sounded, and behaved like one - young, clean, handsome, untainted by the freneticism of the time. He had arrived out of nowhere without fanfare and he taken off without fuss. He had stayed aloof and been unaffected by the shoddy carnival swirling around him during his stay in New York, and had simply ignored the skeptics and scoffers who called him a Flying Fool and said he would never make it. Maybe he wouldn't. But there was something so confidently godlike in his demeanor that to some religiously minded Americans it was almost as if he were a Messenger for them, carrying the Word. To others he was a rebel against the shabbiness, cynicism, cheapness, and injustice of their flashy world, challenging the system by which they lived. The more experts swore he would kill himself, the more their dreams rode with him. And from the moment the Spirit of St. Louis took off from the mud of a Long Island airfield into the misted sea, he became a symbol of their own hopes and ambitions, a bright light in a murky world.

To millions of simple people, he was no longer flying for himself but for humanity; he was not simply flying to Paris but blazing the trail to a better life.

If he failed, they would sigh softly and realize that their hopes for him had been too good to be true. But if he made it, a halo would not be too much for him.

For almost fifty years, Charles A Lindbergh had a stormy love-hate relationship with the American people. He was twenty-five in 1927 when he took of in the Spirit of St. Louis for his lone flight across the Atlantic to Paris, and from that time until his death in Hawaii in 1974 he lived out his life in blazing newspaper headlines. He had more heady triumphs and agonizing tragedies than a hundred men might experience in a lifetime, and endured them in a glare of publicity he loathed but could not escape because of the controversy he so often aroused.

The paths of Lindbergh and Leonard Mosley first crossed at the time of the famous Hauptmann trial and subsequently on many occasions in several countries. Mosley became intrigued - and finally obsessed - by the conflicting emotions that seethed behind the controlled front Lindbergh presented to the world. Long before Lindbergh's death he began this study of his enigmatic hero and has been adding substance to it ever since, placing a remarkable man in perspective for the first time.

Mosley has known many people, including Harold Nicolson, Hermann Göring, Paul Stehlin, Joseph P. Kennedy, and William C. Bullitt, who helped shape Lindbergh's destiny. With firsthand interviews, he fleshes out the colorful career of the man who was a genius when coping with machines and the elements but who often had great difficulty in dealing with his fellow man. Mosley tells of Lindbergh's brilliant achievements in aviation, of his influential efforts on behalf of ecology, and of the dark side of his life - how his fierce love of America drove him to extremes, how he was humiliated by his President and barred from fighting for his country in World War II, how he was reviled by those who had once adulated him.

Leonard Mosley, best-selling author of The Reich Marshall, Hirohito, On Borrowed Time, and Backs to the Wall, is well equipped to tell this moving story of a man whose heroism was often too heavy a burden to bear.

ISBN: 376678
Publication Date: 1976
Pages: 446
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4 stars, based on 1 rating

Publisher: Doubleday & Company
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
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Lorainia L. - , reviewed Lindbergh, A Biography on 3/12/2012 + 8 more book reviews

This was a wonderfully written book by an author who had the unique perspective of actually knowing Charles Lindbergh. This text gives the reader an up close look into the private life, dreams and thoughts of a private man caught in the spot light of public scrutiny. From his flight across the Atlantic to the loss of his child and his own deep depression this book introduces us to an extravagantly humble man named Charles Lindbergh.

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