Candace Fleming, author of the much lauded and awarded The Family Romanov, delivers another thoroughly researched investigation into a historical figure in The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh.
It took Charles Lindbergh 33 and a half hours to fly from New York to Paris. His 1927 trip across the Atlantic--flown entirely on his own--was seen as a "victory for the entire human race," a "moral victory" and a symbol of the "heroic adventure of Christian life." Lindbergh was hurled into celebrity, changed in the span of 33 hours from a modest young man to the "second coming." So intense was his celebrity that the 1932 kidnapping of his first-born child is known to this day as the "crime of the century." How and why, then, did the New York Times describe him in 1941 as "Hitler's puppet-agent in America," while people removed his books from shelves and his name from streets?
Fleming lays out the surprising, confusing and at times extremely upsetting life of Lindbergh in this exhaustively researched and extremely detailed biography. With back matter that includes a bibliography, source notes and index, Fleming makes the extent of her research clear for young readers, dividing the bibliography up first by primary and secondary sources, and second by type of source: books, speeches, magazine articles, etc. Not only does this show her work, it also acts as a brief and excellent education in nonfiction writing for students interested in learning about journalism. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness