Books, Arts & Manners: An American Tragedy

The Airman and the Carpenter, by Ludovic Kennedy (Viking, 438 pp., $18.95)

Was it the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in Hopewell, New Jersey, that made holding a child for ransom a trademark crime of the 1930s? Maybe so. My own parents, as I look back on the period, seem to have been obsessively concerned with the possibility of a kidnapping. When a nursemaid unexpectedly wheeled my carriage around the block, and I was “missing” for a few minutes, the roof fell in on the nursemaid. When I reported, a few years later, that a man with an Irish setter had chatted with third-graders in the schoolyard, the roof fell in again, and the schoolyard looked like a police convention.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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The Airman and the Carpenter, by Ludovic Kennedy (Viking, 438 pp., $18.95)

Was it the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in Hopewell, New Jersey, that made holding a child for ransom a trademark crime of the 1930s? Maybe so. My own parents, as I look back on the period, seem to have been obsessively concerned with the possibility of a kidnapping. When a nursemaid unexpectedly wheeled my carriage around the block, and I was “missing” for a few minutes, the roof fell in on the nursemaid. When I reported, a few years later, that a man with an Irish setter had chatted with third-graders in the schoolyard, the roof fell in again, and the schoolyard looked like a police convention.