North to the Orient

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Book Overview

In 1931 Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh set off on a flight to the Orient by the Great Circle Route. The classic North to the Orient is the beautifully written account of the trip.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156671409
• ISBN13: 9780156671408
• Release Date: September 1966
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Great reading

This is one of the best books I have had the pleasure of reading. She is a fantastic writer. She can describe a thought or feeling in a clear and concise way. I have read many aviation themed books and this is among the best. It goes far beyond the aspect of aviation.

An Interesting Historic book

While going through my grandmother's old books I came across an original of "North to the Orient". I enjoyed reading it so much that I've passed it along to a friend who is homeschooling her daughter. The account is interesting and well written. She is a very good writer, and one can "see" the places she's visited through her narrative. This book is proof that history can be as interesting - and much more educational - than fiction. I recommend it for anyone with a "pioneering spirit" or who is interested in travel and people.

A Journey Through Uncharted Skies--Through Anne's Eyes...

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's own description of her life, and that of her husband Charles Augustus, is as great a love story as has ever been told... ...and "North to the Orient" but a mere chapter! They seemed destined to be at each other's side, living tales such as this.Anne describes best her attempt to chronicle this aerial and literary journey for her reader: "I have not written a technical account of a survey flight on the great circle route from New York to Tokyo. I do not know enough to write one, and if I did, the time for doing so would be past. Aviation moves a long way in four years. No geographical knowledge can be gained from reading my story. We constructed no maps or charts, and I have not even kept a scientific record of all the territory passed. It is not in any sense a guidebook. Our stops were so short and hurried that only a superficial picture remains. Nor is each point on our route portrayed, but only those which seem to warrant description for the vividness of impression." She adds pointedly that, "It was not that we arrived in Baker Lake on August third by plane, but that three hours of flying had brought us from the modern port of Churchill to a place where no white woman had ever been before...", concluding that:"One has only to see the chasm between accessibility and isolation--narrow, so one could reach across, but deep as time--to appreciate what can bridge it." In "North to the Orient", we gain the opportunity to see air travel pioneered "first person"--through the eyes of a woman--yes: ...riding along......but not as baggage or ballast, but rather, as a working participant in an important expedition. ...one who crews not only a primitive, tandem-cockpit aircraft of wood and fabric, but also operates its radio of tubes and coils where transmissions are made via a Morse Code key. ...and one who also flies this wooden wonder into the unknown, as her companion silently rests--trusting, and not fearing--while she takes him to places he too, has never known. I think that is where the beauty lies--not in the journey or the adventure itself--but how she somehow manages to remain side-by-side with her companion in life; how he responds and thrives just by being in her eyes; and how she is needed. How no one dares question this soulfully-dependant relationship between the two! Rather, all the world endeavors in its attempt to understand these two lovers and adventurers......and in understanding her, in particular. One marvels at her words from the confines of the cockpit, as they embark from North Haven on the first leg of their dangerous journey, leaving friends, family, and even their baby behind, on this remarkable, selfless quest: "The day was hard and clear and bright, like the light slanting off a white farmhouse. The island falling away under us as we rose in the air lay still and perfect, cut out in starched clarity against a dark sea. I had the keenest satisfaction in embracing it

The best flying memoir ever written.

Three years after her marriage to Charles Lindbergh, Anne Morrow Lindbergh left her infant son with her mother and a nanny in North Haven, Maine, strapped herself into the open cockpit of a Sirius floatplane, and flew with her husband to the Orient, following the Northwest Passage through arctic Canada and Alaska that her husband was surveying for the airlines. Her literate, supremely controlled prose is remarkable quite beyond the adventure itself. A year after her return, Anne Morrow faced the horror of her child's kidnapping and its aftermath and quite understandably fell into a prolonged depression. She wrote "North to the Orient" partly to rescue herself from the isolation and despair of those circumstances. The memoir went on to win the National Book Award and launch a celebrated career. You will not believe how gracefully she writes, what suspense she contains in her tight chapters. Finishing it, Anne Morrow Lindbergh not only contributed a literary adventure tale on a par with Wilfred Thesiger's "Arabian Sands." The writing of the book itself was a courageous act. This is one of the great neglected works of American nonfiction.

A journey through uncharted skies--through Anne's eyes...

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's own description of her life, and that of her husband Charles Augustus, is as great a love story as has ever been told......and "North to the Orient" but a mere chapter! They seemed destined to be at each other's side, living tales such as this.Anne describes best her attempt to chronicle this aerial and literary journey for her reader: "I have not written a technical account of a survey flight on the great circle route from New York to Tokyo. I do not know enough to write one, and if I did, the time for doing so would be past. Aviation moves a long way in four years. No geographical knowledge can be gained from reading my story. We constructed no maps or charts, and I have not even kept a scientific record of all the territory passed. It is not in any sense a guidebook. Our stops were so short and hurried that only a superficial picture remains. Nor is each point on our route portrayed, but only those which seem to warrant description for the vividness of impression." She adds pointedly that, "It was not that we arrived in Baker Lake on August third by plane, but that three hours of flying had brought us from the modern port of Churchill to a place where no white woman had ever been before...", concluding that:"One has only to see the chasm between accessibility and isolation--narrow, so one could reach across, but deep as time--to appreciate what can bridge it." In "North to the Orient", we gain the opportunity to see air travel pioneered "first person"--through the eyes of a woman--yes: ...riding along......but not as baggage or ballast, but rather, as a working participant in an important expedition. ...one who crews not only a primitive, tandem-cockpit aircraft of wood and fabric, but also operates its radio of tubes and coils where transmissions are made via a Morse Code key. ...and one who also flies this wooden wonder into the unknown, as her companion silently rests--trusting, and not fearing--while she takes him to places he too, has never known. I think that is where the beauty lies--not in the journey or the adventure itself--but how she somehow manages to remain side-by-side with her companion in life; how he responds and thrives just by being in her eyes; and how she is needed. How no one dares question this soulfully-dependant relationship between the two! Rather, all the world endeavors in its attempt to understand these two lovers and adventurers......and in understanding her, in particular. One marvels at her words from the confines of the cockpit, as they embark from North Haven on the first leg of their dangerous journey, leaving friends, family, and even their baby behind, on this remarkable, selfless quest: "The day was hard and clear and bright, like the light slanting off a white farmhouse. The island falling away under us as we rose in the air lay still and perfect, cut out in starched clarity against a dark sea. I had the keenest satisfaction in