Lost Star

Over half a century after Amelia Earhart and her plane disappeared into the South Pacific, could the tantalizing mystery of what really happened to her and her navigator, Fred Noonan, be finally solved? Randall Brink, a former airline pilot and aviation editor who is also experienced in the ways of the Washington bureaucracy, has spent ten years of pains-taking research in voluminous, still-classified military and government files to find an answer. After many dead ends, suits against a reluctant government, interviews with witnesses willing to talk for the first time, and forays into equatorial islands of the Pacific, Brink has unearthed documents and photographs that provide strong new evidence about the circumstances of the last flight. Using his aviation background to reinterpret photographs and technical data that have been misunderstood until now, he has meticulously pieced together the truth: Amelia Earhart disappeared while on an espionage mission over Japanese-held islands in the Pacific, a mission undertaken at the specific behest of the United States government. How that mission came about and why it has been covered up for more than fifty years is the fascinating story of Lost Star.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.