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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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