Book excerpt: "The Aviator and the Showman" by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

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Everybody knows about Amelia Earhart's mysterious final flight. But what about the years before she disappeared?

In "The Aviator and the Showman" (to be published July 15 by Viking), documentary filmmaker and journalist Laurie Gwen Shapiro draws on newly-uncovered sources to explore the famed pilot's life and her marriage to wealthy publisher George Putnam. Theirs was a relationship that lifted love, publicity and especially risk to mythic heights.