01 September 1996

Book Review/Recensione: I was Amelia Earhart, by Jane Mendelsohn, ****

Recensione in italiano di seguito

From the New York Times, 3 July 1937



Synopsis

A fictitious account of Amelia Earhart's last flight, with flashbacks to her childhood and difficult marriage. Amelia and her raffish, drunken navigator, Noonan, crash-land on a desert island. They fight, touch madness and finally fall in love, before taking off again on only half a tank of petrol.


Review

This novel is a rendering of Earhart's last voyage across the Pacific. The author tells us of an imaginary diary she wrote about her flight as well as about her intricate and eventually loving relationship with her debauched navigator. The reader is very much involved and feels part of the story, a yet to be solved mystery! Especially interesting for lovers of flying, as it allows us to understand the problems of technology and navigation of that time (1930s).


Articles by Jane Mendelsohn on Amelia Earhart:

A Wing And A Myth
The New York Times, December 27, 1996

A piece of metal found a few years ago on an island in the Pacific might be old enough to have come from Amelia Earhart’s plane. That is what experts at the Alcoa Technical Center who examined the scrap have just determined, prompting people to wonder again about the fate of the aviator. Was she spying on the Japanese? Did she land on a desert island? Did she, her navigator and her Lockheed Electra go down in the Pacific?

You can read the rest of this article on the New York Times website.


Found and Lost
The New York Times: June 9, 2012

THERE was a picture of Amelia Earhart in the newspaper. Actually, it was in this newspaper. I read the accompanying article while riding on a train from New Haven to New York when I was in my mid-20s. Although I had graduated a few years earlier, I was still living in the town where I’d gone to college. New Haven was cheap, and book reviews paid money back then. This was in the early ’90s. The train was quiet. No one had a cellphone. The article in the newspaper said that a search party believed it had found a piece of Earhart’s plane on an atoll in the Pacific. And maybe a piece of her shoe.

You can read the rest of this article on the New York Times website.









You can also visit the website of the film on Amelia Earhart.








Sinossi

Amelia è il miglior pilota del mondo negli anni '30. Grazie alle doti organizzative del suo manager e marito ha compiuto con successo una trasvolata atlantica. Ora si imbarca in una impresa temeraria: il giro del mondo in aereo. Ma il destino mette in forse l'impresa. Il navigatore assoldato è un ubriacone, la radio funzione male, il carburante non è stato controllato. Un atterraggio fortunoso su un'isoletta del Pacifico, ed è la salvezza. I due impareranno a conoscersi, superando la reciproca incompatibilità e finiranno per amarsi. Ma quando arrivano i soccorsi...


Recensione

La storia romanzata dell'ultima impresa di Amelia Earhart, la leggendaria aviatrice degli anni trenta del secolo scorso. Mendelsohn ce la racconta tramite un diario immaginario scritto dalla stessa aviatrice, formula avvincente che fa sentire il lettore molto partecipe, dentro l'avventura. Il libro è da considerare un romanzo dunque, anche se l'atmosfera della vera spedizione transoceanica viene trasmessa al lettore. Un mistero, quel volo, ancora non risolto e che forse non lo sarà mai. Bel libro soprattutto per gli appassionati di storia del volo, ci fa capire quali fossero i problemi tecnologici e di navigazione di quell'epoca.


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