Locked Rooms And Open Doors

Description for LOCKED ROOMS AND OPEN DOORS: DIARIES AND LETTERS 1933-1935 by Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

The years 1933 to 1935 might properly be called "A Steep Ascent." After the kidnapping of their first child and the birth of their second, the Lindberghs were faced with a difficult readjustment. More relentlessly in the spotlight than ever, and in constant fear for their newborn son, they had moved, for privacy and protection, to the Morrow family estate in Englewood. For Anne Lindbergh, this meant a return to childhood pressures and anxieties, aggravated by the pull of two sometimes oppositional loyalties.

But these were also years of spectacular achievements for both Lindberghs. As copilot, navigator, radio operator, photographer, and log keeper, Anne accompanies her husband on another legendary flight in pioneering air travel. In a single-engine seaplane, the Lindberghs explore possible air routes across the Atlantic on a trip that lasts five-and-a-half months and takes them from New York via Greenland and Iceland to Europe, Atlantic islands, Africa, and finally across the ocean to South and North America. General Lindbergh has described this expedition as more difficult and hazardous than his earlier flight in the Spirit of St. Louis.

The diaries give an affectingly immediate sense of the hardships endured by a young woman sharing the exploits of a singularly determined vigorous man. Far more than in any of her previously published books about their flights together, Mrs. Lindbergh shows what it was really like: her struggles with fear, homesickness for her child, and the varied discomforts of cold, heat, excessive fatigue, primitive living conditions, bugs, and exposure to public curiosity. In compensation, there are the high rewards of early flying beauty and adventure, of equal partnership in a demanding task, and of living up to the standards set by an exceptional husband.

On their return home, tragedy soon takes over again. The kidnap trial, with its inevitable publicity and reenactment of the past, creates an unbearable climate for the Lindbergh family. The book ends with a sea voyage that will change their lives once more---from America to England.