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By Candace Fleming
Schwartz & Wade, 2011
$18.99, ages 8-12, 128 pages.
Award-winning Fleming strips away the mystique that surrounds the legendary aviatrix to show a woman as fallible as any other but driven to conquer the air like no woman before her.
"All I wished to do in the world was to be a vagabond in the air," Amelia Earhart once said, and though Earhart met criticism in her later career for profiting from aviation, it was this guiding dream that defined her until her death.
When Earhart's plane vanished in 1937, her husband, late publisher George Putnam, worried that her disappearance would overshadow her legacy, and for some perhaps it has, yet Fleming doesn't dwell on Earhart's disappearance but lets it fade in and out of chapters about her life.
Fleming, the acclaimed author of The Great and Only Barnum, makes sure we know what we need to know about Earhart, and that we see her for what she was, a real, but unusually driven woman. As biographer Mary S. Lovell described Earhart, she was "an ordinary girl growing into an extraordinary woman who dared to attempt seemingly unattainable goals in a man's world."
We meet a woman who was at times impulsive and headstrong, who with Putnam could work the media and profited greatly from her record-setting feats, yet who had unstoppable courage and enthusiasm, and who not only earnestly believed a woman could do everything a man could do, but wanted other women to believe that to.
Two years before her fateful flight around the world, Purdue University hired Earhart to inspire female students to take up careers in male-dominated fields, and while teaching there, Earhart became so enthusiastic about her mission that she asked to live in the women's dorms and would talk late into the night with female students.
She told the young women to "look beyond the comfort and security of marriage and instead 'dare to live,'" Fleming wrote, and counseled them to study whatever they wanted to. "Don't let the world push you around," one student recalled her saying.
What makes this biography stand out is Fleming's diligence in sorting fact from myth, her clarity about what Earhart stood for, and the clever way she sets up the book: she immerses readers in a chronology of Earhar
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