A Soaring Mystery of History

Full disclosure: I’ve always been a nerd. It was, perhaps, a childhood popularity liability, but I have long since leaned into it. I kid you not when I say that I often greeted summer with a heavy heart (I also love routine!) and, accordingly, I set about designing a summer syllabus for myself to keep the wheels turning until school fired back up in August.

I still remember climbing the stairs of the old Carnegie Library to visit the Reference Department on the second floor. The computers with their beige-on-beige towers and behemoth monitors whirred and clicked on sturdy wood tables, but my interest was not in those dark mills. I wanted to peruse the stacks – preferably with a kindly, bespeckled guide. I don’t remember her name, only that she had glasses that made her eyes appear owl-like and wore the most delightfully old-fashioned frocks complete with a brooch! My Virgil, she let me through a gamut of topics over the years: The Titanic, NASA and space exploration, the oceans, a comparative study of major religions, birds, various wars, Dickens’ England, The Brontës: a study; alas, I had to spend more and more time in the…new…part of the building as my interests took on a more literary bent.

In light of this whimsical quirk of childhood to explore heartily with reckless abandon, I’m going to lean into something a bit obscure: the 85th anniversary since the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. This is a topic with peculiar durability that fascinates a wide swath of people. We love a good mystery, and that starts young.

Our children’s department has a robust set of offerings for young (and young at heart) readers to learn about this intrepid explorer. There are many general biographies from which to choose, so I’ll just toss out Who Was Amelia Earhart? by Kate Boehm Jerome (j 921 Earhart, A.) as a great place to start. The local middle school uses Candace Fleming’s Amelia Lost: The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart (also j 921 Earhart, A.) as their non-fiction choice, and it’s a great study in how primary sources (original documents from the time period) can be interwoven with narrative to yield a rich and engaging text.

Upstairs at the public library yields a fulsome bounty for adult readers. The non-fiction section boasts no fewer than a half-dozen titles on the topic, and of these, I will recommend two: Susan Butler’s comprehensive, engaging, and deeply researched East to the Dawn and the author’s own words in Earhart’s autobiography The Fun of It (both titles 921 Earhart, A). But if your predilections make you more interested in the mysterious disappearance and subsequent search, we have books that focus more narrowly that fit the bill.

The Mr. Gradgrinds among us may not appreciate this next section, but I delight in an imaginative – evenly liberally so – take on real people and events. Think musicals 1776 and the wildly popular Hamilton. So, while we await the production of Take Flight by the Sugar Creek Players and cross our fingers for the successful crowdfunding of Final Approach, we can at least revel in Jane Mendelsohn’s novel I Was Amelia Earhart (FIC Men), which imagines what happened after Earhart and her navigator disappeared. Sticking in this vein, the library also has the film Amelia (DVD FIC Ame) starring Hilary Swank, Richard Gere, and Ewan McGregor which dramatically conceives the major events in Earhart’s life.

Obviously, an anniversary provides a reason to delve into this particular topic, but it’s just an example of the sort of deep dive you can do into anything that interests you. Lean into your curiosity at the library! If we don’t have the book, we’re always looking for suggestions to improve our collections, and we’d also welcome the opportunity to help you use ILL to get it from another library. It’s true that today amongst our staff there are fewer frocks and not a single brooch to behold, but most of us are still bespeckled, and we are all happy to help you with your own soaring explorations.

The Crawfordsville District Public Library is open Monday-Thursday 9 AM-9 PM, Friday-Saturday 9 AM-5 PM and on Sundays from 1 PM-5PM.