Amelia Earhart; A Biography

Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990. Second Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xiii, [1], 321, [1] pages. Illustrations. Bibliography. Reference Notes. Index. Foreword by Jeana Yeager. Inscribed by the author on fep. Additional ink notation on fep. DJ has sticker residue on spine and back. Doris Rich lived for many years in Asia, where she started as a Red Cross assistant for the U.S. Army in Korea. From 1949 through 1967, she was a freelance journalist-photographer. Before moving to Washington, DC in the early 70s, she also taught English in Bangladesh and Ghana. At the age of 66, Doris embarked on her career as a biographer; her published books include Amelia Earhart: A Biography and Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator. Jeana Lee Yeager is an American aviator. She co-piloted, along with Dick Rutan, the first non-stop, non-refueled flight around the world in the Rutan Voyager aircraft from December 14 to 23, 1986. The flight took 9 days, 3 minutes, and 44 seconds and covered 24,986 miles, more than doubling the old distance record set by a Boeing B-52 bomber in 1962. She died mysteriously before she was forty. Yet in the last decade of her life Amelia Earhart soared from obscurity to fame as the best-known female aviator in the world. She set record after record—among them, the first trans-Atlantic solo flight by a woman, a flight that launched Earhart on a double career as a fighter for women's rights and a tireless crusader for commercial air travel. Doris L. Rich's exhaustively researched biography downplays the "What Happened to Amelia Earhart?" myth by disclosing who Amelia Earhart really was: a woman of three centuries, born in the nineteenth, pioneering in the twentieth, and advocating ideals and dreams relevant to the twenty-first.