SOURCE: A review of I Was Amelia Earhart, in Salon (online publication), September 18, 1996.

[In the following review, Whittamore asserts that Mendelsohn's book "brings Amelia Earhart to life, more than any straight biography ever could.]

"Hubris and liquor" made Amelia Earhart crash, according to Jane Mendelsohn, her literary channeler in I Was Amelia Earhart. "The more he (her navigator, Fred Noonan) drank, the more reckless she became, the more he drank." If you don't mind riding on thermals of speculation without a glider of fact, you'll love this novel, which purports to tell the story of Earhart and Noonan after their plane goes down. If you do mind, I Was Amelia Earhart will feel indulgent and bothersome until about page 46, when the imaginative loop-deloops arch into something higher than sheer style: "We saw the same sights and felt the same breezes," writes Mendelsohn of Earhart and Noonan, pre-flameout. "We...