It feels a little sacrilegious to not have loved this book. Amelia Earhart was an amazing woman, both as an aviator and as a woman blazing trails for other women in STEM (although they certainly didn't call it that back then). Reading about her desire to open up a makerspace (yes, I know I'm being anachronistic, you get the point) for women at Purdue was SO. FREAKING. COOL. And I have a feeling that, had Ameila made it back to California, all of her recollections about her groundbreaking flight around the world would have been edited and put together into a proper book.

As you know (SPOILER ALERT) Amelia did not make it back to California. Therefore, this book just ends. And it was almost entirely not edited by her husband, George Putnam (whom Amelia fondly refers to as "Mr. Putnam" in the book, very lovey-dovey), except in a few locations. This makes the book a bit hard to read at times. The narrative structure isn't very consistent. You'll get a chapter that's almost exclusively about the flight from one point to another, and then get a chapter that's almost all about a certain location, and some chapters go between one and the other so quickly that it's hard to figure out what's going on. I get it, the lady was too busy flying to write a book! She didn't live to fix things here and there after the fact! So I'll try to cut her some slack, but the book does suffer for it.

I spent a lot of time reading the book thinking about all of the changes that have been made in aviation since the 1930s. What would Amelia think about GPS, checking sectional charts on your iPad as you fly, airplanes that can break the sound barrier, and wide-bodied aircraft that can carry more than 600 passengers nearly around the world in such a short amount of time? I will try not to take any of these amazing things for granted when I fly (in a tiny little composite sport aircraft that weighs about 600 pounds soaking wet and can only carry 22 gallons of gas)! ( )

Last Flight is a book published in 1937 of Earhart's failed attempt that year at flying solo across the Pacific Ocean.

Published posthumously as a tribute, her husband, publisher George Palmer Putnam, edited the collection as Earhart's account of her ill-fated last flight around the world, begun in 1937. Compiled here are dispatches, letters, diary entries and charts she sent to her husband at each stage of her trip.

Earhart's writings cover the period from March 1937 up until her final entry on July 1, the day before her plane was reported missing en route to Howland Island in the South Pacific. The work is augmented by additional material written by Putnam, as well as a poem, "Courage", which Earhart had herself written.
Although credited to Earhart, historians have cast doubt as to how much of this book was actually written by Earhart and how much had been rewritten or embellished by Putnam.