A detailed chronicle of the last days of Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, and what went before, based upon an exhaustive 25-year study. Celebrated pilot Elgen Long and his coauthor wife, a public relations consultant with the Western Aerospace Museum, claim that the solution of the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the Electra, Earhart’s plane, has never been found until now. The fatal flight began on July 2, 1937, during an era of “firsts” in the fast-developing technology of pioneer aviation. As speed and endurance records toppled around them, Earhart and Noonan took off on an around-the-world flight across the equator. Wiley Post had soloed around the world in a record seven days in 1933. Earhart’s flight in a late model plane had been bankrolled and otherwise supported by her influential husband, G.P. Putnam of Putnam Publishers, many friends, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Navy, the Army Air Corps, and aviation experts. Every possible precaution seemed to have been taken for a successful flight. But as a newly discovered report reveals, while Earhart and Noonan were flying the leg from Lae, New Guinea, to remote Howland Island in the Pacific, a faulty direction finder, poor radio communications, and an inaccurate map of Howland led the Electra off course while the plane ran out of fuel. Earhart and expert navigator Noonan did not know the Morse code used by the military. Earhart’s last voice transmission noted that she was running out of fuel. Debunking rumors that Earhart and Noonan were captured by the Japanese, the Longs conclude that the plane, without any survival equipment aboard, must have ditched in the vast Pacific, miles from Howland. The empty fuel tanks would have filled up rapidly with sea water, causing the Electra to sink. The Longs’ extensive research, coupled with their mastery of technical detail, should make this the definitive study of its subject.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-86005-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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