EX LIBRIS: Lost: Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937, days away from completing her record-setting flight around the world. The official search was abandoned after 16 days. The unofficial search has never ended. In Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life, Rachel Hartigan retraces the three main theories of Earhart’s disappearance, introducing a cast of eccentric characters consumed by discovering the truth. Did the aviator and her navigator fly off course to spy on Japanese military bases, only to be captured? Did they land on a remote Pacific island—where Hartigan traveled—and die as castaways? Or did they run out of fuel and crash into the ocean? Hartigan, a former National Geographic writer, intersperses the search for Earhart with the story of Earhart’s extraordinary life—her unstable childhood, her itinerant early career, and her unconventional marriage to a PR-savvy publisher who transformed her into an aviation icon—and illuminates why we remember Amelia Earhart today.