Can anyone tell me how the book Finding Amelia is? I love the book Amelia Earhart's Shoes, I have read it twice. I am finishing up the second time as we speak. Is Finding Amelia as good as Amelia Earhart's Shoes or better.?
Matt, I've read all 3 (including Dr. King's based-on-fact novel
Thirteen Bones), and so the first thing to note is that they represent three very different genres.
The quartet of King, Jacobson, Burns, & Spading turned out a very entertaining book with
Amelia Earhart's Shoes. The reader gets a nice all-encompassing review of the facts about Amelia's flight, the history of Nikumaroro, and the ongoing TIGHAR saga of testing the Nikumaroro Hypothesis. I can't wait for the next revision that picks up where the updated edition left off (in 2004). Like you, I pick up
Shoes periodically and enjoy it again and again. It's light reading, even though it's so full of facts. King and his co-authors have produced a work that easily captivates anyone looking into the mystery of the disappearance of Amelia and Fred. The authors sure know how to entertain their readers.
Dr. King's
Thirteen Bones is, as I said, a novel, which allows him to incorporate fictional characters and events surrounding the colonization of Nikumaroro not many months after the disappearance of Amelia and Fred. But it's all blended so well with known facts that the person steeped in those facts can have a good time nodding the head and acknowledging that, "Yup, it could have happened that way." But I'd reserve reading that until after tucking into both
Shoes and
Finding Amelia, ideally multiple times each -- and reading reams of Earhart Forum postings from over the past 15+ years -- above all, be able to always remember that
Thirteen Bones is a work of fiction, cleverly written by Tom King.
Finding Amelia is a fine historical telling of the facts of Amelia and Fred's stories and the planning and execution of the two World Flights. Then there follows a thoroughly well-researched telling of the facts of all aspects of the search that began when they failed to arrive at Howland Island on July 2, 1937: details about USCGC
Itasca; the aerial search of the Phoenix Islands by the aviators flying off the battleship
USS Colorado, led by Lieutenant Lambrecht; and, the following search by the planes off the aircraft carrier USS
Lexington. The details about the radio signals are laid out in detail, including the story about Betty's Notebook and other instances of people who said they heard Amelia calling for help. What you will not find is the plethora of detail about Nikumaroro that you'll find in the other two books. In that sense, the title can be misleading, since the bulk of it is about Amelia and Fred going missing, followed by the intense search for them that took place in 1937. I'm sure that the next companion volume will lay out in similar detail the latter day efforts of TIGHAR to test the Nikumaroro Hypothesis over the past 25+ years. Ric Gillespie (assisted well by his wife, Patricia Thrasher, I'm sure) is a first-rate writer of history. And if you're lucky, your hardcover copy of
Finding Amelia will contain the DVD with lots of important documents, such as the deck log of USS
Colorado.
So there are the three genres:
Amelia Earhart's Shoes is light reading of the story of Amelia and Fred, with emphasis on TIGHAR's years of expeditions;
Thirteen Bones is an enlightened fictional account of colonial life on Nikumaroro, written by a man with impeccable academic credentials to do so; and
Finding Amelia is a very enjoyable but serious historical accounting of the story of the loss of Amelia and Fred and the 1937 search for them.