Books: Flying Lady

SOARING WINGS—George Palmer Putnam—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Lanky, tousle-mopped Amelia Earhart, whom the Pacific swallowed two years ago, flew the Atlantic twice: in 1928 with a pilot (she never touched the controls); in 1932 solo. Soaring Wings, a family memoir by her publicity-loving husband, George Palmer Putnam, is full of scrappy, discursive trivia (Flier Earhart kept bowls of little yellow tomatoes around the house to eat at random, slept three nights in a new flying coat to get it suitably wrinkled) but does manage to tell how this four-year air change came about.

Aviator Earhart was still relatively unskilled in flying when she became famous as an airwoman. Commercial flights and publicity ventures gave her experience, helped pay for the longer hops she took for the fun of it. She never quite broke even, though her extracurricular activities ranged from being a peripatetic faculty member of Purdue, to designing women's shirts with tails ample enough to let their wearers stand decently on their heads. A feminist (her husband "cannot remember introducing her even once as Mrs. Putnam") she was still feminine (her thought going through a thunderstorm over the Gulf of Mexico: "How pretty my ship must look against such a background—and there is nobody here to see it.").

A nonsmoker, Flier Earhart endorsed Lucky Strikes to get the $1,500 she wanted to give the first Byrd Antarctic expedition. She liked meeting fellow celebrities. The Prince of Wales agreed with her that fliers made good dancers, after which they spent an evening together proving it. But when Amelia Earhart's plane disappeared in the Pacific she was doing the thing she liked best.