Reeve Lindbergh's memoir offers a uniquely intimate portrait of her family led by her intensely private father, aviator Charles Lindbergh, and mother, writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Under a Wing captures both her parents' complex personalities with immediacy and intimacy. Reeve explores the contrast between a loving father who "would parade imaginary animals across our backs" and the exacting patriarch who, upon return from his frequent absences, called each of his five children into his office to peruse a handwritten list of their achievements and failures. She seems anguished in her response to one of Charles's notorious, bigoted speeches: "How could someone who spoke the words my father did in 1941," she asks, "how did such a person then raise children who by his instruction and his example, day after day and year after year, had learned from him ... that such words were repellent and unspeakable?" She offers too a blunt but tender portrait of Anne in old age--she has been physically and mentally impaired by a series of stroke--that proves she has a mature understanding of a deeply loving woman who nonetheless always held some part of herself in reserve for her writing. This impressive memoir brings readers close to the private people within two legendary public figures.


From Publishers Weekly
Having already written about her family's life after Charles Lindbergh's death in the autobiographical novel The Names of the Mountains, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh's youngest has written an evocative reminiscence of her youth in Darien, Conn., with her two famous parents. This gentle memoir shows a unique and uniquely poignant family life: "In our family it has always been hard to know what is right and what is wrong, in terms of what we can do for one another. It has been hard for us, too, to separate individual identity from family identity." The resulting publicity left their family with a fear of exposure. The author's father was always wary of what others could see?a cautiousness that extended to clothes, architecture and even the color of the family car. Although her father was constantly trying to shape and mold his children (no Wonder Bread, marshmallow fluff, grape jelly or candy was allowed at home and lectures and discussions were frequent), his widely perceived anti-Semitism ultimately hurt his family deeply. Anne Morrow Lindbergh emerges from this retrospective as a gentle, even ethereal, intellectual whose style was the polar opposite of her husband's. While the reader might like to know more about Reeve and her own family, instead, we are given an intimate look at other family members and at her parents' marriage. From an idyllic?if somewhat isolated?youth in Darien, to her father's death and her mother's mental deterioration, Reeve has watched and learned and shared with readers what she refers to as the living language of her parents' marriage. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA-This beautifully written memoir allows readers to see the author's family as she knows them. She offers vivid descriptions of events, whether they be a flying lesson with her father, Charles Lindbergh, or the pain of watching the deteriorating health of her mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The author speaks about the circumstances of her eldest brother's kidnapping and death as a baby and how that tragedy forever affected her parents and their interactions with their other children. Readers also meet other relatives, including maternal and paternal grandparents and cousins, and see what roles they played in the family's lives. Lindbergh shows that her family's relationships have not always been easy but they have been close and deep. She doesn't shy away from the truth and yet she manages to be honest without being hurtful. A truly wonderful portrait of a famous family.Peggy Bercher, Fairfax County Public Library, VACopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This elegantly written memoir by the youngest child of aviators Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh is a terrific surprise. Among the vital lessons Reeve Lindbergh learned growing up in her remote father's well-ordered household was the importance of words: Both her parents were best-selling authors. Even after his fall from national political grace, Charles Lindbergh remained godlike to his family. But, to her credit, the daughter's beautiful account of an awe-inspiring if loving parent is less sparing, in its way, of Lindbergh's political mistakes than Scott Berg's biography (p. 54). A rare memoir whose goal is not to expose but finally to understand. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The Washington Post Book World, T. H. Watkins
...[a] loosely structured but often wry and compelling mosaic of life with father (and without, since he was gone much of the time).


From Booklist
Novelist Lindbergh veers away from fiction to embrace the memoir form in an intimate, revelatory reminiscence of growing up in the household of her exceptional parents. With great fondness and the mature perspective of a woman in her early fifties, the youngest child of aviator and American hero Charles Lindbergh and beloved writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh tellingly reflects on the foibles, as well as the strength of character of those two well-known figures. The resulting, lovingly rendered diorama is inhabited by a full cast of relatives from both sides of the family and permeated by the powerful legacies of her parents' marriage. Depicting more present-day realities, Lindbergh writes about her aging mother's mental deterioration, a sister's death from cancer, and her own loss of a son in heartfelt recollections that permit readers to enter the private world of a very famous family. Alice Joyce


From Kirkus Reviews
Published at almost the same time as A Scott Berg - s materful biography of Lindbergh, a sweetly moving memoir of growing up as the daughter of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The novelist (The Names of the Mountains, 1992, etc.) is the youngest of five Lindbergh children, all born after the tragic kidnapping of the famous couple's first-born son. Few knew the Lindberghs had such a large family, and that was how the family wanted to keep it. To escape publicity, they moved frequently, finally settling in an old stone house in Connecticut, where Reeve grew up after WWII. Her father traveled habitually, consulting for government and industry, but was a devoted - if domineering - parent when home, exercising ``affection and discipline in equal measure, often at the same time.'' Her mother was a quieter, less controlling presence; she wished to ``heal, soothe, and uplift us.'' Although Reeve learned little of her kidnapped brother, eventually she too lost a son when he was not yet two years old. Her mother sat with her by the little boy's body, and together they mourned the lost babies. After Charles Lindbergh died nearly 25 years ago, Reeve sought him out again in his boyhood home in Little Falls, Minn., now a state park site. She reflected there on how to reconcile public and private images of famous parents, as well as on the man who taught his children that intolerance was ``repellent and unspeakable'' - yet who himself wrote and uttered anti-Semitic statements. Anne Lindbergh, now in her 90s, suffering from the aftereffects of stroke, often doesn't recognize her daughter. Reeve writes about her mother's illness with sorrow, anger, humor, and acceptance. She also remembers her grandmothers, her siblings - especially her sister, who died of cancer five years ago - and pleasant summers in Maine. An eloquent recollection of a happy childhood in a tightly knit family whose parents' celebrity complicated but did not contort their lives. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"A wonderful family memoir."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A poignant and superbly written memoir...A story of fascinating contradictions."
--Chicago Tribune

"Touching...[an] often wry and compelling mosaic of life with father."
--The Washington Post

"Marvelous, moving...An insider's look at the Lindberghs' private lives...this is a daughter's-eye view: gentle, candid and illustrated with intimate everyday details."
--USA Today

A New York Times Notable Book and an Alternate Selection of the Literary Guild and the Doubleday Book Club


Review
"A wonderful family memoir."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A poignant and superbly written memoir...A story of fascinating contradictions."
--Chicago Tribune

"Touching...[an] often wry and compelling mosaic of life with father."
--The Washington Post

"Marvelous, moving...An insider's look at the Lindberghs' private lives...this is a daughter's-eye view: gentle, candid and illustrated with intimate everyday details."
--USA Today

A New York Times Notable Book and an Alternate Selection of the Literary Guild and the Doubleday Book Club


Book Description
"We Lindberghs still know ourselves best as a tribe: close-knit, self-enclosed, and self-defining, always prepared to be besieged by invisible forces upwelling from the past...."

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 a bestselling author. To their five children they were Father, never Daddy, and Mother. Charles, a stern yet loving father, was surprisingly affectionate and playful; Anne provided a great, gentling love. With remarkable candor, their youngest daughter provides a rare, intimate look at her legendary family...the pervasive impact of her brother's kidnapping and death...the complexity of her parents' long, loving marriage...the night her life and her mother's converged, as Reeve's own infant son died suddenly. With grace and insight, Reeve Lindbergh appraises her remarkable parents, her unusual childhood, and the troubling questions that remain. At once an eloquent reminiscence and a slice of American history, Under a Wing is, at its core, a heartfelt tribute to an extraordinary family.



From the Inside Flap
"We Lindberghs still know ourselves best as a tribe: close-knit, self-enclosed, and self-defining, always prepared to be besieged by invisible forces upwelling from the past...."

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 a bestselling author.  To their five children they were Father, never Daddy, and Mother.  Charles, a stern yet loving father, was surprisingly affectionate and playful; Anne provided a great, gentling love.  With remarkable candor, their youngest daughter provides a rare, intimate look at her legendary family...the pervasive impact of her brother's kidnapping and death...the complexity of her parents' long, loving marriage...the night her life and her mother's converged, as Reeve's own infant son died suddenly.  With grace and insight, Reeve Lindbergh appraises her remarkable parents, her unusual childhood, and the troubling questions that remain.  At once an eloquent reminiscence and a slice of American history, Under a Wing is, at its core, a heartfelt tribute to an extraordinary family.


From the Back Cover
"A wonderful family memoir."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A poignant and superbly written memoir...A story of fascinating contradictions."
--Chicago Tribune

"Touching...[an] often wry and compelling mosaic of life with father."
--The Washington Post

"Marvelous, moving...An insider's look at the Lindberghs' private lives...this is a daughter's-eye view: gentle, candid and illustrated with intimate everyday details."
--USA Today

A New York Times Notable Book and an Alternate Selection of the Literary Guild and the Doubleday Book Club

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 the kidnapping and murder 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 strokes have eroded her mother's mind, while her voice remains in the books that Reeve never read while growing up but treasures now for their revelations.

Reflecting on her parents, Lindbergh observes that they strengthened one another, both as parents and as writers. Fiercely protective of their children (for reasons the children never understood when young), they stressed the importance of family. She writes about how her family has been diminished by the recent loss of her closest sibling, her sister, Anne, to cancer. Written with grace, charm, candor, and love, Under a Wing is heartfelt tribute to an extraordinary family.

FROM THE CRITICS

James Tobin - Chicago Tribune Books

Superbly written.

Bob Thompson - Washington Post

Resonates with intimate detail. . .restoring the humanity behind the fame.

Publishers Weekly

Having already written about her family's life after Charles Lindbergh's death in the autobiographical novel The Names of the Mountains, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh's youngest has written an evocative reminiscence of her youth in Darien, Conn., with her two famous parents. This gentle memoir shows a unique and uniquely poignant family life: "In our family it has always been hard to know what is right and what is wrong, in terms of what we can do for one another. It has been hard for us, too, to separate individual identity from family identity." The resulting publicity left their family with a fear of exposure. The author's father was always wary of what others could see--a cautiousness that extended to clothes, architecture and even the color of the family car. Although her father was constantly trying to shape and mold his children (no Wonder Bread, marshmallow fluff, grape jelly or candy was allowed at home and lectures and discussions were frequent), his widely perceived anti-Semitism ultimately hurt his family deeply. Anne Morrow Lindbergh emerges from this retrospective as a gentle, even ethereal, intellectual whose style was the polar opposite of her husband's. While the reader might like to know more about Reeve and her own family, instead, we are given an intimate look at other family members and at her parents' marriage. From an idyllic--if somewhat isolated--youth in Darien, to her father's death and her mother's mental deterioration, Reeve has watched and learned and shared with readers what she refers to as the living language of her parents' marriage. (Oct.)

Library Journal

This memoir by the youngest child of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh provides a rare look into the lives of a closely guarded famous family. Reeve Lindbergh, an author of young adult fiction, relates how she gradually came to realize that her parents were famous and how the events that made them famous affected all of their lives. Without sugar-coating her parents, especially her father, whose domineering personality was a source of almost constant frustration, she poignantly reminisces about how she could never live up to his expectations, how her parents handled the murder of their first son, and how she herself coped with the loss of a sister to cancer, her own son's death, and her mother's decline. A forthright and moving memoir; recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/98.]--Ronald Ray Ratliff, Chapman H.S. Lib., KS

School Library Journal