GoKawiilFamed aviator Amelia Earhart mysteriously disappeared in 1937 during an attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. Speculative theories abound about what really happened to Earhart, but while tantalizing hints of her fate have popped up from time to time over the last 90 years, none have proved conclusive. The people behind those theories, and the extraordinary woman who still inspires them, are the focus of an eminently readable new book, Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life, by Rachel Hartigan.
A former editor of The Washington Post’s Book World, Hartigan worked for National Geographic magazine for 12 years, covering such diverse topics as the genetics of persimmon trees and the history of women’s suffrage. So why a book about Amelia Earhart? Hartigan acknowledged that she asked that question herself “in the darkest moments of writing.”
After all, there are countless biographies for readers of all ages, as well as books touting various theories about Earhart’s disappearance, not to mention occasional news coverage about the latest attempts to locate Earhart’s plane or her remains. (Just last fall, we reported on Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s The Aviator and the Showman, a biography exploring Earhart’s unconventional marriage to George Putnam, a flamboyant publisher with a flair for marketing.) “I just didn’t feel there was a book that tied everything together,” Hartigan told Ars. “You get these news stories of people saying they know where Amelia Earhart is, but you don’t have any context beyond the immediate story, all the things that make it a full picture.”
Hartigan hadn’t been particularly fascinated by Earhart when she got the chance to join a 2017 National Geographic-funded expedition to Nikumaroro Island to search for any evidence that the aviator and her navigator, Fred Noonan, may have been castaways there. “I definitely stumbled into it as a journalist,” she said. “I was literally on my way to the copy room and my editor said, ‘Oh, we have a berth on a ship going to the island where people think Amelia Earhart died. Do you want to go?’” Hartigan accepted, ultimately writing two feature stories for the magazine about the 2017 expedition and its 2019 follow-up (led by Robert Ballard). And those blossomed into a full-length book.