North to the Orient

I just finished reading Anne Morrow Lindbergh's North to the Orient just a few minutes ago. Because it is summer, I have relatively more time to read and to write reviews. Also, I am taking advantage of the fact that Teddy is watching one of his favorites at the moment: Abbott and Costello's Hold That Ghost. Due to financial constraints I am not flying as much as I had hoped to in recent weeks, but I am using this time to read as many classic and essential books on flying as I can and of course one of the titles that I have seen in used bookstores and heard about over the years is North to the Orient.
Anne met Charles not long after he made his famous trans-Atlantic flight and they were married a few years later. She became a pilot herself, she was the first woman to obtain a glider pilot's license (1930) and also earned her private pilot's license in 1931. On her many voyages with her famous husband, she served as co-pilot, navigator and radio operator...and navigation and radio operations are much easier now than they were then.
This book chronicles the trip the Lindbergh's made in 1931 from New York to China using a great circle route which would lead them north to the orient, not west as one would generally think would be the shorter route. Their route led them north into Canada, Point Barrow Alaska, Russia (then the Soviet Union), Japan and finally China.
For me while reading this book, I kept thinking about their baby Charles Jr., who was kidnapped not long after this trip and murdered. I think I read that she actually wrote this first book (she wrote many), which was published in 1935 as a way to deal with her son's death. It is really sad when she makes a few references to the baby in the book (he was already born, but of course didn't go on this trip).  I have to think that the death of their first son affected them and changed who they were from that time forward. I can imagine that losing a child is just not something from which parents recover...they go on, but they don't recover completely.
A beautifully written book, it captured the essence of the Lindbergh's in their early years of marriage before their son's death, before they were involved in isolationist views before WWII and before the many other challenges their marriage weathered. She casually mentions her "husband" several times in the book...just casually, without the acknowledgement that he was the most famous person in the world at the time.
For pilots such as myself and those interested in the aviation aspects of the book, it was my first exposure to seaplanes, I learned a lot about the the Sirius (the pontooned monoplane that the Lindbergh's used on many adventures and is now on display at the Smithsonian), I learned a lot about the old days of radio on aircraft and that even Lindbergh could have a hell of time fighting his way through fog...not a weather phenomenon to be taken lightly by any pilot.
The last paragraphs of the book describe the magic of flight about as well and poetically as any I have ever heard or read before. Anne Morrow Lindbergh lived a long life dying in 2001 at the age of 94. Her husband died several years before in 1974. This book has inspired me to read The Spirit of St. Louis again...which I first read in May of 1988...24 years ago!