SOURCE: "Earhart as Brave, Careless, Marooned and in Love," in The New York Times, April 26, 1996, p. C31.

[In the following review, Kakutani asserts that Mendelsohn manages to make her version of the fate of Amelia Earhart oddly convincing, but criticizes her "phony lyricism."]

In the last few years, there has been a lot of speculation about what might have happened to Amelia Earhart, the famous flygirl whose plane mysteriously disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in July 1937. In Lost Star: The Search for Amelia Earhart (1994), the aviation industry journalist Randall Brink suggested that Earhart was on a spying mission for the United States Government, and that she was shot or forced down by the Japanese when her plane wandered into restricted airspace. He further suggested that the Roosevelt Administration helped orchestrate a cover-up of her story, and that she might have even returned to America after the war and...