Cloud Racers

Who would be the first aviator to singlehandedly fly all the way around the globe? That was all anyone wanted to know in the summer of 1933, when Wiley Post and Jimmie Mattern set out from New York in a pair of wood-and-canvas propeller planes. Post, a one-eyed Oklahoma farm boy with a desperate past, was as comfortable in the cockpit as he was socially awkward back on the ground. Mattern was a Hollywood stunt pilot and social sidekick of Howard Hughes who had fallen on hard times, and an accident-prone daredevil who'd walked away from more plane crashes than he could count. They were friends as well as rivals, members of a small fraternity of aviators - their circle included Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart - at a time when flight was still a perilous business. Each was determined to conquer one of the last frontiers in a rapidly civilizing world-and neither knew the dangers that lay ahead.

In Cloud Racers, Adam L. Penenberg tells the story of Post's and Mattern's rollicking journey from the canyons of Manhattan to the wilds of the Russian Arctic and back again, and brings back to life an era in which the sky remained a place of mystery and wonder.

©2014 Adam L. Penenberg, The Atavist (P)2014 Adam L. Penenberg, The Atavist