Amelia Earhart's Shoes: Is the Mystery Solved?, by Karen Ramey Burns
"Whatever happened to Amelia Earhart?" has been an enduring question since she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared somewhere in the Pacific on July 2, 1937. Since then, the mystery has been "solved" by people who claim, among other things, that she was flying as a U.S. agent against the Japanese, that she died in a prisoner-of-war camp and that she was abducted by aliens.
This book posits that due to bad weather, Earhart and Noonan missed their refueling stop on Howland Island in the mid-Pacific and landed on Nikumaroro, a small island south of their target. While most Earhart quests are based on imaginative, usually untested hypotheses, this volume is scrupulous in not making any unevidenced assertions. Working from a wide range of fields its authors are an archeological consultant, a geophysicist, a forensic anthropologist and an army engineer this book claims that human bones and a shoe found on Nikumaroro indicate that Earhart possibly landed and died there.
Unlike other Earhart detectives, the authors repeatedly emphasize that their conclusions are tentative and conjectural. While their judgments are tantalizing and plausible, the fun of the book is being in on the excitement of the discoveries and the scientific testing of the hypothesis. Written in a colloquial, good-humored style that takes itself seriously but is not above cracking a joke to make a point, this is a must for "what happened to Amelia" fanatics, and also those who are interested in how science can be used to test the veracity of theories about historical mysteries.
--Publishers Weekly
The Legend of Baby Doe, by John Burke
In her pulchritudinous prime Baby Doe was called the Silver Queen of Colorado by journalists and "that shameless hussy" by the proper wives of the men who eyed her. Flirtatious, adventurous, ambitious, Elizabeth McCourt Doe gave everyone a lot to talk about when she met Horace Tabor, the Silver King of Leadville, in 1880. Three years later they were free to legalize their passion. Although thirty years separated them, they were well matched in romantic recklessness. If The Legend of Baby Doe is the lowdown on the high jinks of two public lives, it is also the story of a love that survived spectacularly good times and bad.
Before bad times came, Baby and Horace went on a spending spree. They built an opulent opera house in Denver and bought an Italianate villa. Baby Doe went out bejeweled and ermined, and sat at home alone, snubbed by the social dragons. John Burke has written about the giddy rise of a bonanza king who dreamed of entering the White House with Baby Doe on his arm and about the disastrous fall they took together. Wiped out by unwise investments and the Panic of 1893, Tabor soon died, leaving Baby Doe and their two daughters penniless. Reportedly, his deathbed order was to "hang on to the Matchless," a played-out mine filled with water. She managed to do that for almost four decades, struggling heroically against loneliness, poverty, and heartbreak, and becoming one of the great legends of the American West.
Before bad times came, Baby and Horace went on a spending spree. They built an opulent opera house in Denver and bought an Italianate villa. Baby Doe went out bejeweled and ermined, and sat at home alone, snubbed by the social dragons. John Burke has written about the giddy rise of a bonanza king who dreamed of entering the White House with Baby Doe on his arm and about the disastrous fall they took together. Wiped out by unwise investments and the Panic of 1893, Tabor soon died, leaving Baby Doe and their two daughters penniless. Reportedly, his deathbed order was to "hang on to the Matchless," a played-out mine filled with water. She managed to do that for almost four decades, struggling heroically against loneliness, poverty, and heartbreak, and becoming one of the great legends of the American West.
Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire, by Amanda Foreman
(The new edition is titled The Duchess, but is the same book)
Georgiana Spencer was, in a sense, an 18th-century It Girl. She came from one of England's richest and most landed families (the late Princess Diana was a Spencer too) and married into another. She was beautiful, sensitive, and extravagant--drugs, drink, high-profile love affairs, and even gambling counted among her favorite leisure-time activities. Nonetheless, she quickly moved from a world dominated by social parties to one focused on political parties. The duchess was an intimate of ministers and princes, and she canvassed assiduously for the Whig cause, most famously in the Westminster election of 1784. By turns she was caricatured and fawned on by the press, and she provided the inspiration for the character of Lady Teazle in Richard Sheridan's famous play The School for Scandal. But her weaknesses marked the last part of her life. By 1784, for one, Georgiana owed "many, many, many thousands," and her creditors dogged her until her death.
Biographer Amanda Foreman describes astutely the mess that surrounded the personal relationships of the aristocratic subculture (Georgiana and the duke engaged for many years in a ménage à trois with Lady Elizabeth Fraser, who inveigled her way into the duke's bed and the duchess's heart). Foreman is, by her own admission, a little in love with her subject, which can lead to occasional lapses of perspective, but generally it adds zest to a narrative built on, rather than burdened by, scholarship, that is at once accessible and learned. An impressive debut, in every sense. --David Vincent, Amazon.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment