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The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever
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Average Rating:  out of 8 Reviews
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Price: $14.95
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Sale: $3.50
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Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
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EAN (European Article Number): 9780060528164
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: David M. Friedman
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Publisher: Harper Perennial
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Edition: Reprint
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Dewey Decimal Number: 920
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Publication Date: 2008-09-01
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Reading Level: 368
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Description: His historic career as an aviator made Charles Lindbergh one of the most famous men of the twentieth century, the subject of best-selling biographies and a hit movie, as well as the inspiration for a dance step—the Lindy Hop—that he himself was too shy to try. But for all the attention lavished on Lindbergh, one story has remained untold until now: his macabre scientific collaboration with Dr. Alexis Carrel. This oddest of couples—one a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning surgeon turned social engineer, the other a failed dirt farmer turned hero of the skies—joined forces in 1930 driven by a shared and secret dream: to conquer death and attain immortality. Part Frankenstein, part The Professor and the Madman, and all true, The Immortalists is the remarkable story of how two men of prodigious achievement and equally large character flaws challenged nature's oldest rule, with consequences—personal, professional, and political—that neither man anticipated.
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: really interesting |
Date: 2008-10-30 |
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Details: You might think you know Charles Lindbergh, the guy who flew the plane and got famous, had a kidnapped & killed baby boy, etc. But Lindbergh was a really complex guy, with a difficult personality and his own views on things. This book is about one of those things.
It's a fascinating account of his relationship with another unusual person who happened to be a surgeon and medical researcher. Lindbergh is not well known for this portion of his life, but his mechanical intuition led to the forerunner of the cardiac bypass pump!
Great book. Vicki of Mobile |
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Review Summary: America's Faulty Hero |
Date: 2008-07-10 |
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Details:
Careful textbooks in my home state, Minnesota, portray Charles Lindbergh as an "isolationist" opponent to US participation in World War II. After all, he was a hero - OUR hero - a Swedish American from our state. Author David Friedman, with quite thorough evidence, portrays Lindbergh differently, as an admirer of Hitler and Hitler's Germany, who wrote to his American friend that Hitler "is undoubtedly a great man, and I believe he has done much for the German people. He is a fanatic in many ways, and anyone can see that there is a certain amount of fanaticism in Germany today... On the other hand, Hitler has accomplished results...which could hardly have been accomplished without some fanaticism."
Friedman explains: 'For Lindbergh, Germany seemed everything that America was not and probably could never be: a country composed of one virile, morally and ethically pure race committed to science, and united in a vision of national greatness. That such unity came at teh cost of democratic institutions, individual rights, and a free press didn't alienate him. Democracy was anoble idea, Lindbergh believed, but the reality was quite different...in the United States, where social and political equality, together with a free press...produced a climate of degeneracy... Only a strong visionary, and yes, even fascist, leader was best equipped to restore moral order to western civilization.'
In Lindbergh's own words, from an article he published in Reader's Digest in 1939: Aviation "is a tool especially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others copy in a mediocre fashion, another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe -- one of the priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown.... We, the heirs of European culture, are on the verge of a disastrous war, a war within our own family of nations... Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves, on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or an infiltration of inferior blood..." Aviation, by the way, was in Lindbergh's opinion the Third Reich's strong suite; neither England nor the USA could match the Luftwaffe in technology or skill, as he consistently testified to the Congress and war departments of the USA.
Friedman documents Lindbergh's enthusiasm for "social Darwinist" eugenics, his anti-Semitism and overall racism, his contempt for the rule of rules, and his indifference to dialogue and compromise. In all of this ideological extremism, however, Lindbergh had a mentor, one of the few humans he respected as his own equal or even superior, the French Nobel-winning Dr. Alexis Carrel, the WW1 discoverer of battlefield antisepsis and the first developer of techniques for suturing arteries. Through much of the 1930s, Lindbergh trained himself in biology and worked side by side with Carrel to develop instruments and methods to maintain the life of organs outside the bodies of mammals. Lindbergh's mechanical genius, in fact, enabled him to invent waht might be called the first artificial heart. The story of this collaboration is the heart of Friedman's book; he clearly sees it as a story of gigantic psychological hubris, almost a gothic horror story of Mankind striving for immortality. (I confess that the scientific aspects of this story are truly fascinating to me, as a tale of genius without a speck of rational sense!)
In every way except sympathy for Germany, Carrel was more a Nazi than Lindbergh - a virulent racist, an explicit eugenicist, a visionary whose vision was the creation of a "high council of experts" who would guide humanity behind the scenes. "There is no escaping the fact that men are not created equal," he told a reporter once, "as democracy, invented in the 18th century -- when there was no scienc to refute it -- would have us believe." The human race is moved forward, he continued, "by great men... Unfortunately, we don't understand the genesis of great men. Perhaps it would be effective to kill off the worst and keep the best, as we do in the breeding of dogs."
Lindbergh's strident opposition to FDR on every front, and his enthusiasm for letting Germany expand at the expense of the Soviets earned him some interesting support in the months before the die was cast at Pearl Harbor, especially from a group of young students at Yale, who called themselves The Committee to defend America First, and who inlcuded, among others, Douglas Stuart Jr., Kingman Brewster, Potter Stewart, Sargeant Shriver, and Gerald Ford.
Once the war involved American soldiers, however, Lindbergh found himself isolated, ostracized, even despised by his previous idolators and friends. Harold Nicholson, a close family friend and the biographer of Lindbergh's father-in-law, wrote of him that "his virility and ideas became not merely inflexible but actually rigid; his self-confidence thickened into arrogance and his convictions hardened into garnite. He became impervious to anything outside his own legend," largely because of the trauma of the kidnapping of his first son. It's an assessment that reminds me a good deal of Sen. John McCain's description of General Douglas MacArthur in the book Hard Call, and strangely enough, of McCain himself, whose formative experience was the trauma of captivity.
Lindbergh may have been rigid, but he was far from unchangeable. As gracefully and patiently as such a man could, he reinserted himself in the military campaign to defend America, first as an advisor and then as a comabt pilot, showing a courage in the air war against Japan that restored him almost entirely to the good graces of the American people. And then, in the aftermath of the war, when he inspected sites in Europe and encountered the evidence of Nazi brutality and genocide, Lindbergh re-invented himself once more... as an incipient pacifist and critic of war crimes committed by any country. Inspecting the ash pit into which twenty-five thousand human slaves had been shoveled, worked to death at the Nazi's V-2 factory, Lindbergh had an epiphany; he wrote: "What the German has done to the Jew in Europe, we have done to the Jap in the Pacific. As Germans defiled themselves by dumping the ashes of human beings into these pits, we have defiled ourselves bulldozing bodies into shallow, unmarked tropical graves. What is barbaric on one side of the Earth is barbaric on the other... It is not the Germans alone, or the Japs, but men of all nations to whom this war has brought shame and degradation."
One might think that Lindbergh had traveled as far and as fast as a lone eagle ever could, but there came still a later epiphany, in the 1950s, when Lindbergh turned against the technological, mechanical values he'd so ardently championed, and became a fierce crusader for conservation of Africa and of pre-modern cultures! This time, he wrote: "..the African framework of life contains ideas and values which may seem backward... but who is to say that the record of future evolutionary ages will prove the black to be less progressive than the white?...If civilization is progress in the basic sense of life, then why have past civilizations fallen -- sixteen of them in the last few thousand years, according to arnold Toynbee?" Is civilization progress, Lindbergh asked. "The final answer will be given not by the discoveries of our science, but by the effect our civilized activities as a whole have upon the quality of our planet's life."
Wow! I couldn't say it better myself! My childhood hero was quite a man!
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Review Summary: amazing |
Date: 2008-05-21 |
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Details: The story is compelling and unbelievable if it were not true. History as you never knew it to be and this needs to be made into a motion picture. |
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Review Summary: A clear look at the time Lindbergh and Carrel worked together on organ transplantation |
Date: 2007-10-26 |
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Details: This book centers on the period of Charles Lindbergh's life when he was working with Dr. Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Carrel had won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1912 for his work on suturing blood vessels. He had also been lauded for his method of disinfecting wounds with chlorine (this was decades prior to the development and use of antibiotics). They were both famous men and, when introduced, they found they had many interests and views in common. Lindbergh's sister-in-law, Elizabeth Morrow, had a very weak heart that was going to shorten her lifespan and he felt medicine should have a way of replacing worn out organs just as he replaced parts in an airplane engine. Carrel was the leading authority in that field at that time and their work together is the central story of this book.
During their years of working together, Lindbergh designed and developed the world's first perfusion pump that allowed entire organs to be kept alive for extended periods without becoming infected. Both Lindbergh and Carrel were interested in pursuing an extended lifespan and rejected the inevitability of death. Of course, the popular press misunderstood what they were after and what Lindbergh had developed. It was regularly called a glass heart or an artificial heart, but it wasn't.
Lindbergh and Carrel also shared similar views on the superiority of the European or White race and the necessity of preserving and defending it. They both saw the coming war in Europe as a disaster that might go far beyond the losses and devastation of the Great War (World War I, we call it). Yes, Lindbergh favored Germany over Britain, but not for the reasons usually ascribed to him. Yes, he and Carrel viewed Jews as a separate race and they talked of good and bad Jews. However, they also helped Jews including a former assistant who went on to a brilliant medical career. Carrel and his wife were also mystics and impressed the Lindberghs and many others in ways that would embarrass anyone of a scientific reputation today.
While I don't want to be seen as defending Lindbergh's views at this time in his life, it does have to be noted that eugenics was in the air and various strains of it were advocated by many famous people. Many of these advocates of this now discredited movement still have a solid reputation today (even if their views on eugenics are kept hush hush in popular discussions). And one can still hear eugenics arguments made today, but it is never called by that name.
Essentially, Lindbergh saw Germany's manufacturing efficiency, engineering supremacy, and military discipline as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. He did not want the United States drawn in to a war that would leave Europe vulnerable to an expansionist communist movement. Carrel shared his anti-war views. However, once war came, Carrel went back to France to help as best as he could with his medical abilities. His reputation was smeared and was called a collaborationist, but all evidence shows this was not true. Lindbergh wanted to enlist, but was blackballed by FDR, so he went to the Pacific theater and flew several dozens of combat missions as a uniformed civilian. He shot down enemy fighters, dropped bombs, engaged in air battles, and shot up Japanese military assets on the ground.
After the war, Lindbergh's views on religion, science, and nature changed. He became a pioneering environmentalist and stirred up as much controversy supporting species preservation and natural habitat as he had when he was speaking against the United States entering World War II.
This is a very interesting story and supplements Berg's famous biography of Lindbergh. The author, David Friedman, even quotes from Berg's "Lindbergh" a few times. This is a well-balanced book that shows the complications of these men without feeling the need to make simplistic judgments or justifications. I found it very much worth reading.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, Michigan
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Review Summary: Brilliant analysis of two brilliant minds (perhaps three) |
Date: 2007-10-15 |
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Details: Never having read a real biography of Lindberg, and never having heard of Alexis Carrel, this book introduced me to a new universe of thought. Friedman is empathetic and compassionate when he describes the tragic (as in Greek tragedy, a flaw that dooms greatness) shortcomings of men he obviously very much admires. Carrel and Lindberg thought of themselves, with some justification, as Olympians. Carrel didn't suffer fools gladly - or at all - but he comes across as a far more human being than the driven, dispassionate, aloof Lindberg. It's easy to understand Lindberg's fascination with Nazism - all that counts is getting the trains to run on time, no matter whose bodies lie across the tracks. Friedman paints two very complex pictures of 'great men', and great men they truly were, and their close personal and professional relationships. Friedman also portrays Ann Morrow Lindberg as a brilliant although self-doubting artist of great sensitivity. Reading of Lindberg's treatment of his wife reinforces the general portrait of a cold, humorless, obsessive tyrant. Finally, the author gives the reader enough detail to understand the what, how and why of the Carrel/Lindberg quest for immortality through organ replacement without ever losing me in a flood of technical minutia. One of the most fascinating tales I've ever read and extremely well told. |
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