Winters, Kathleen C.

views updated

Winters, Kathleen C.

PERSONAL:

Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; immigrated to the United States; married.

ADDRESSES:

Home—St. Paul, MN

CAREER:

Pilot, historian, and author.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Marshall Claybourn Trophy; Henry Combs Trophy, Central Region.

WRITINGS:

Anne Morrow Lindbergh: First Lady of the Air, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to magazines, including Woman Pilot, Aviation for Women, and Soaring.

SIDELIGHTS:

Though much has been written about Anne Morrow Lindbergh and her life with her husband, aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh, biographers have paid little attention to Anne's own achievements as an aviator. Kathleen C. Winters, a trained pilot and an aviation historian, aims to give Anne Lindbergh her due in Anne Morrow Lindbergh: First Lady of the Air. Dealing only briefly with the well-known facts in Anne Lindbergh's life, including her relationship with Charles and the infamous kidnapping and murder of the couple's baby son in 1932, the book draws on the Lindberghs' original flight logbooks and other materials to highlight Anne's role as Charles's copilot, navigator, and radio operator on several flights across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and across North America. The Lindberghs also explored polar air routes linking North American with Asia and completed a five-month global survey flight that contributed to advances in commercial aviation. These ambitious projects, as Winters shows, succeeded in large part because of the valuable assistance that Anne Lindbergh provided in the air. Reviewers praised Anne Morrow Lindbergh as a well-researched and readable account that portrays its subject as a complex individual. In Booklist, Colleen Mondor wrote that Lindbergh "emerges as a more complete and relatable character then ever before," while a Kirkus Reviews contributor described the book as a "perfectly calibrated tribute to an early heroine of the air."