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REVIEWS 283 tion. Working from Eve Sedgwick's and Luce Irigaray's notions of male "homosocial bonding" and the (figurative) exchange of women in literary culture, Epstein argues that biography "habitually" "figures the relationship between biographer and biographical subject as an abduction." Epstein traces a genealogy of biographical abductions from Walton's Donne, to Johnson's Life of Savage and Boswell's Life of Johnson, and, in an egregious contemporary example, Norman Mailer's "novel biography" of Marilyn Monroe. The argument is on the whole a powerful one, but in his discussion of Mailer's controversial biography, Epstein's metacritical self-awareness seems unable to resolve its own complicity in Marilyn Monroe's discursive abduction except through an atavistic confessional ritual; Epstein tells an effusive personal anecdote from his promotion and tenure ordeal exemplifying homosocial bonding within literary studies. While one can applaud critics who attempt to situate their own critical interests and practices, Epstein's autobiographical gesture runs the risk of displacing a much needed institutional critique with that most ideological of (autobiographical functions, the production of exemplary selves, hardly the task of a work that aspires to "contest the subject." But I am being overly critical; Contesting the Subject is just the beginning of what promises to be a substantive dialogue between biography and contemporary theory. Perhaps the 1990s will be the decade in which biography finally attracts the critical interest this poor relation so richly deserves. Steve Bradbury Program for Cultural Studies East-West Center Dorothy Herrmann, Anne Morrow Lindbergh: A Gift for Life. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992. 382 pp. $24.95. Unlike her husband, Charles, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (AML) has, until recently, received little biographical notice. This lack of attention is somewhat surprising given that she was the daughter of "one of the most famous men of his time," the wife of "America's last hero," the mother of the child kidnapped in the "crime of the century ," a nation-wide media target of Nazi sympathy, and, after regaining face, one of America's "most popular and beloved authors." With the exception of the literary analyses in David Kirk Vaughan's Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Boston: Twayne, 1988) and Elsie F. Mayer's My Window on the World: The Works of Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1988), the latter of which Dorothy Herrmann failed to cite, AML has been greatly overshadowed by her husband in the numerous biographical accounts of this family. Dorothy Herrmann recently grasped this golden biographical nugget and chronologically unfolded the life of AML before readers in Anne Morrow Lindbergh: A Gift for Life. In the first of twenty-four unevenly balanced chapters, readers are introduced to a shy young girl, intimidated by her domineering father, the J. P. Morgan and Company partner, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, and senator from New Jersey, Dwight Whitney Morrow, and by the beauty and charm of her elder sister, Elizabeth. Later, the Trans-Atlantic pilot, Charles Lindbergh, who appeared, "so much slimmer, so much taller, [and] so much more poised" than Anne expected, enticed Anne for a flight which, according to Herrmann, filled the Smith College Anne with such 284 biography Vol. 16,No. 2 ecstatic and "quasi-sexual" emotions that both flying and Charles remained the two "inextricably linked" features of her life. Media intervened into the lives of Charles and Anne from the time of their announced engagement, and it hounded them throughout their married life. Herrmann 's account delves into the intricacies of the couple's often unsuccessful attempts to dodge the press. Their loss of privacy became tormenting after their first son, Charles, Jr, was "stolen" from their Hopewell, New Jersey, residence. To avoid the mobs of well-wishers and those who, through unscrupulous methods, attempted to gain access to their home, and to alleviate the fears that their second child, Jon, might suffer a similar fate, the Lindbergh's turned to the escape they knew best—flight. First, they began a series of flights taking them to four continents and thirty-one countries in order to survey possible routes and base points for Pan American Airways. Ultimately, however, it was their flight from America and a self-imposed exile to...

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