An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us, and: A Drinking Life: A Memoir (review)

Book Reviews219 use the white cane he had resisted so long. Hint: the happy ending involves a dog. Under a Wing:A Memoir, by Reeve Lindbergh. DeU, 1998. 224 pages, paper $12.95. The other memoir I am recommending is Under a Wing by Reeve Lindbergh, the youngest chüd of Charles Lindbergh. We aU know about the baby who was kidnapped, but what about the five subsequent children whose privacy and safety were so carefuUy guarded? This is a strictly personal account of what it was Uke to grow up in the Lindbergh family, and this book, too, I read for famüy reasons: My father worked for the airlines and actuaUy knew Lindbergh. A charming combination of immediacy, humor, and forgiveness characterizes the memoir as a whole. It is neither a hatchet job nor a whitewash; we can trust this writer to be fair. For example, Reeve Lindbergh does not ignore controversy such as her father's notorious anti-interventionist stance in 1941, but she presents it as part of the famüy consteUation, another instance when he should have listened to his wife and didn't. He was too sure he was right. And yet Charles Lindbergh was also tender. When a confused young man came to the door claiming to be the kidnapped chüd—and more than one did—the aviator would put an arm around the young man's shoulder and lead him offthe property. Later we hear how that baby becomes real to Reeve only when she herself loses a chüd to crib death and she and her mother sit by the dead baby, something Ann Morrow Lindbergh never got to do with her stolen chüd. Surprisingly it is Ann Morrow Lindbergh who is at the heart of this memoir. Even in old age, betrayed by Alzheimer's disease, she remains the other wing under which Reeve can stiU take shelter. Reeve Lindbergh looks back at difficult material and manages to see it with her father's clarity and her mother's grace. Ken Autrey "I thought I could save my father's Ufe," Christopher Dickey recaUs in Summer of Deliverance, a recently pubUshed memoir about his late father, James Dickey. Of course he cannot, except that the story itself constitutes a kind ofsaving—or salvaging. This is an old story. In the past quarter-century a number ofmale writers, like Dickey, have attempted to confront and com- 220Fourth Genre prehend—if not to save—their fathers. And often, as these two father-son memoirs suggest, these writers often do weU to save themselves from their fathers. An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us, by James CarroU. Houghton Mifflin, 1997. 288 pages, paper, $13.00. In this memoir, which won the National Book Award, noveUst and Boston Globe columnist James CarroU recounts his troubles with his müitary father. The elder CarroU is a prominent FBI agent who becomes a confidante ofJ. Edgar Hoover. Then, in an unprecedented leap, in 1947 he is made an Air Force general, Director of the Office of Special Operations. When James decides to become a CathoUc priest his parents are proud, but when he comes out in opposition to theVietnamWar, he aUenates them. Later, James again disappoints his father by resigning from the priesthood, explaining, "I want to have a life like yours, with a loving wife and chüdren." General CarroU bitterly responds, "Why would you want chüdren? They would only grow up and break your heart."This "requiem" is a heartbreaking tribute to an imperfect father, aU the more moving because, despite their irreconcilable differences, father and son never quite give up on one another. A Drinking Life:A Memoir, by Pete HamiU. Little, Brown, 1995. 265 pages, paper, $12.95. Fifty years ago in blue-coUar Brooklyn, Pete HamiU's father holds a menialjob as a clerk and is generaUy absent as a parent. Only when the stillyouthful Pete tags along to neighborhood bars does he see him come to Ufe: "He was known everywhere for his singing, his laughter, his Irish blarney." HamiU's own drinking life begins at age eleven under unlikely circumstances...