Finding Amelia

The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance

By: Ric Gillespie

Narrated by: Mike Lenz

In the seventy years since the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan during a flight over the Central Pacific, their fate has remained one of history's most debated mysteries despite dozens of books offering solutions. This book is different. It draws on thousands of never-before-published primary source documents to present a narrative that corrects decades of misconception. Ric Gillespie offers a very realistic picture of Earhart, her attempted world flight, the events surrounding her disappearance, and the U.S. government’s failed attempt to find her. Scrupulously accurate yet thrilling to read, the book is based on information uncovered by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). Gillespie, TIGHAR's executive director and a former aviation accident investigator, notes that he does not argue for a particular theory but supports the hypothesis that Earhart and Noonan died as castaways on a remote Pacific atoll.

©2011 Ric Gillespie (P)2022 Scribd Audio

Ending is more of a cliff-hanger than I expected

I found this book somewhat interesting, but also somewhat disappointing. It is very narrowly focused on Amelia’s attempt to circumnavigate the globe, and especially her disappearance and the ensuing search. There is very little about her personal life or earlier adventures. There is also nothing about more recent investigations of Amelia’s disappearance. Nor is there much about conspiracy theories surrounding Amelia.

Much of the book is focused on a seeming minute-by-minute account of various faint or cryptic radio transmissions reported around the time Amelia disappeared. This gets to be a little tedious and I found myself anxious to move on to some other aspect of the story.

Perhaps most disappointing of all is the abrupt way the story ends. Obviously, with Amelia’s story still a baffling mystery, any book on the subject is going to lack a fully satisfying ending. But this story seems to end almost in mid-sentence. There is a mention of the 1940s discovery of specific human remains, along with a woman’s shoe. There is mention of the possibility of testing those remains against dental records. But there is no mention of whether any testing of any kind ever happened. We are just left hanging.

At the beginning of the book, the author suggests that there is really no mystery, suggesting that by the end of the book, the author plans to offer at least a coherent theory of what happened to Amelia. Maybe there is something along these lines that comes out over the course of the book, but I was expecting more, and especially was expecting some kind of summary of conclusions at the end of the book.

I’m sure this is an important and thoroughly researched book about Amelia, but I it is not quite the book that I was expecting. Looking forward now to listening to other books about Amelia that flesh out more of her story.

Interesting story

Interesting story well presented however, no real new information other than the comedy of errors by those involved in the search. Probably related to the poor communication apparatus available at the time.