Of Flight and Life

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948. First Edition [contains the Scribner "A" on the verso]. Hardcover. Very good/good. viii, 56 pages. Occasional footnotes. DJ is in a plastic sleeve. DJ has some wear, soiling, edge tears and chips. Charles Augustus Lindbergh (February 4, 1902 - August 26, 1974), nicknamed Slim, Lucky Lindy, and The Lone Eagle, was an American aviator, author, inventor, military officer, explorer, and social activist. In 1927, at the age of 25, Lindbergh emerged from virtual obscurity as a U.S. Air Mail pilot to instantaneous world fame as the result of his Orteig Prize-winning solo nonstop flight from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, to Le Bourget Field in Paris, France. He flew the distance of nearly 3,600 statute miles (5,800 km) in a single-seat, single-engine, purpose-built Ryan monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh was the 19th person to make a Transatlantic flight, the first being the Transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown from Newfoundland in 1919, but Lindbergh's flight was almost twice the distance. The record-setting flight took 33 1 2 hours. Lindbergh, a U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve officer, was awarded the nation's highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his historic exploit. I In his later years, Lindbergh became a prolific prize-winning author, international explorer, inventor, and environmentalist. How shall we break the grip of a scientific materialism whose values and standards will lead to the end of our civilization? By what higher moral force may we control the science that now threatens to destroy us? Science has become the victim of its technologists, as religion became the victim of its fanatics. Just as the spiritual truths of Christ were perverted by the temporal exploitation of Christian creed and dogma, so the intellectual truths of science are being perverted by the Material exploitation of industry and war. Hiroshima was as far from the intention of the pure scientist as was the Inquisition from the Sermon on the Mount. The personality and insight of a unique individual - one whose experience of flight and of life has been unique - give a strange force to this little book in which an airman, who is also a student of science, attempts to clarify the crisis the world faces, to communicate with men and women of similar concern, to search for a solution. The flight of his thought, in these pages, is like that flight of his, so many years ago, across the lonely wastes of the Atlantic. It is as solitary and daring.