Date: 27 October 2013
Location: Nan
On a beautiful autumn afternoon a dozen Happy Bookers gathered at Nan’s lovely Piedmont home. The excuse for this pleasant gathering was a discussion of the book, The Spirit of St Louis, by Charles A. Lindbergh. Ninety percent of the folks had finished the book so a lively and informed discussion ensued.
In general, the book was appreciated by all, especially so by the more technically inclined readers who even found interest in the significant amounts of data, graphs, specifications, and drawings depicting the famous aircraft used by Lindbergh in his solo flight across the Atlantic. Perhaps a more general audience would wish for fewer aerial acrobatics and more of the terrestrial kind. (One is lead to believe that his only close female friend was his adoring mother.) Before he became famous, Lindbergh was basically an airborne carnival worker which must surely be worth another book.
At any rate, this book is essentially a first-person narrative of the author’s successful attempt to find financial backing, a capable airplane builder, and finally to fly nonstop from New York to Paris in 1927. Holding the reader’s attention when the outcome of the story is already known is a difficult job. Lindbergh has managed this problem by describing his many brushes with death as he learned to fly a rickety Curtiss Jenny, and to parachute and wing walk for the crowds below. He definitely earned the nickname, “Lucky Lindy”. His many long hours of uneventful flying toward Paris is cleverly handled in the book with flashbacks to his childhood and other life stories. Some found this long section of the book to be tedious, as it indeed was for the pilot. Lindbergh was not at all forthcoming with details of his personal life which could have made him more real to the reader. Never, apparently, has a tall, handsome American hero lead such an exemplary life. No hint at all, of the moral compass that went askew years later.
As to where Lindbergh learned to write, that was a mystery to us. The book is smooth, well-paced, and professional; not at all like my first book (should I write one). The Bookers noted the obvious similarity of the situation with female pilot, Beryl Markham in 1935, and her only book, West With The Night. While Markham’s book was almost certainly written by her author husband (at the time), there is only circumstantial evidence that Lindbergh’s was written by his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, herself a respected author. Certainly she must have at least been influential in the book’s final form, if not an active participant. We noted that the book was first published 14 years after the events described, which gave many of his literate family and others ample time to polish both the manuscript and the man himself.
Before adjourning to eat, I showed the group a full-scale drawing of the Clark-Y airfoil (the wing shape on Lindbergh’s plane) to illustrate the surprising size of the 7-foot wing chord. Having a captive audience, I then delayed our meal even further by demonstrating why the aircraft had to be unstable by several inches when fully loaded and it even became worse as the nose tank emptied. Boring.
Finally a great meal. Following the subject matter of our book we had barbecued wings (Clark-Y style), slaw (grass runways), and two kinds of beans (propulsion with backup). And since Lindbergh’s flight “takes the cake”, we had cake. Yum.
— Gary