Description
One Unforgettable Race . . . One Magical Aviator for the Ages . . . Two Unexpected Kindred Spirits
What really happened to legendary aviator Amelia Earhart when she was lost at sea in 1937? Theories abound regarding one of the great mysteries in history, but none seen through the eyes of her kindred spirit, young, courageous journalist Dorothy Kilgallen.
THAT IS, UNTIL NOW!
Girl Around the World is the first book to connect these two inspiring women; Kilgallen, who displayed her courage during the famous 1936 Race Around the World, and Earhart, whose aviation exploits in 1928, 1932 and 1937 made her the most famous woman in the world.
In dramatic fashion, bestselling author and noted historian Mark Shaw reveals for the first time the untold details of the unlikely friendship in the mid-1930s between Kilgallen, the intrepid young journalist, and Earhart, the pioneering aviatrix. Their mutual support ran deep, with Kilgallen covering up close Earhart’s historic 1932 solo transatlantic flight, and Earhart taking a strong, personal interest in Kilgallen’s famous 24-day “Race Around the World,” celebrated this year on its 90th anniversary, against two older male reporters.
In fact, Earhart sent this caring message, “I know you can make it, Dorothy, but you must follow your normal schedule of eating, drinking and sleeping …” to Kilgallen during the “Race,” and when Earhart’s plane was lost at sea in 1937, readers will be shocked to learn that Kilgallen wrote a compelling, never-before-published newspaper account stating, “My heart is with Amelia Earhart today, wherever she is—and I pray that wherever she is, she is safe.”
In a book that will stand the test of time, Girl Around the World unleashes new historical perspectives like never before by using the bond between two kindred spirits so as to chronical the dangerous adventures of these two pioneering women.
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“You’ve seen television’s The Amazing Race, in which teams race around the world by airplane, truck, bus, boat, and on foot, hoping to come in first. But the concept isn’t new. Some 75 years ago, three newspaper journalists competed to see who could traverse the globe in the shortest amount of time. The three wrote daily installments about their experiences for their respective newspapers, and one of the journalists, Dorothy Kilgallen of the New York Evening Journal and International News, gathered her columns into a book titled Girl Around the World, published in 1936.”
—Air & Space Smithsonian magazine, August 31, 2011
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“The desert wastes are full of wild tribesmen who take pot shots at planes. That’s all right for the pilots who fly out of range. But the journal girl didn’t escape danger. A single engine plane on one leg made an emergency landing in a field somewhere in Indo-China.”
—CBS Evening News Reporter’s Notebook recalling Kilgallen’s “Race Around the World,” October 25, 2025
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“One woman was permitted in the [NYC hotel room in 1932]: the young journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. At just nineteen, Kilgallen was already making a name for herself as a cub reporter for the New York Evening Journal, earning Amelia’s admiration. Kilgallen later recounted: ‘I sat up with [George Putnam] all night, observing his smoking and incessant calls to the telephone, witnessing his weariness deepen as the hours slipped away.’ Kilgallen was right there at 9:30 a.m., when the world’s teletypes flashed a message indicating that Amelia Earhart had crashed in Paris, a startling report that punctuated the already uneasy mood. Pacing and clucking his tongue, part wild animal, George anxiously awaited the final confirmation [or her arrival] from London’s Sunday Chronicle. This arrived a punishingly long twelve minutes later.”
—The Aviator and the Showman, Laurie Gwen Shapiro, 2025
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“The way Mark Shaw has handled the blending of the stories of Dorothy Kilgallen and Amelia Earhart works well. It helps that their experiences have considerable common ground, more so than I would have thought without reading the text. The comparison is engaging. And each of their experiences helps to magnify the other’s and reveal the bravery and courage it took to do what they did. In our era we take flying anywhere so much for granted that we fail to fully appreciate what the world was like when these two were bravely setting forth on their adventures. And we also take for granted now that women do most things a man can do. But in their time there wasn’t just a glass ceiling; there was more like an iron ceiling. Yet somehow they broke through. The comparison of these two women really drives that point home.”
—Greg Desilet, Academic Scholar and author of The Enigma of Meaning: Wittgenstein and Derrida, Language and Life