
The Aviator and the Showman
Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon
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Narrated by:
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Stefanie Powers
About this listen
CBS Sunday Morning Summer Book Report Pick • New York Times “Books to Read in July” • A Town and Country Best Book of July • A Barnes & Noble Best Book of July • A BookBub Beach Read Pick
“Laurie Gwen Shapiro has dug deep into the archives, and emerged with an exhilarating tale of the adventurous life of Amelia Earhart and the remarkable relationship that helped to forge her legend. Yet Shapiro goes even further—stripping away the myths and revealing something far more profound and intricate and true. The Aviator and the Showman is one terrific book.”—David Grann, New York Times bestselling author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon
The riveting and cinematic story of a partnership that would change the world forever
In 1928, a young social worker and hobby pilot named Amelia Earhart arrived in the office of George Putnam, heir to the Putnam & Sons throne and hitmaker, on the hunt for the right woman for a secret flying mission across the Atlantic. A partnership—professional and soon otherwise—was born.
The Aviator and the Showman unveils the untold story of Amelia's decade-long marriage to George Putnam, offering an intimate exploration of their relationship and the pivotal role it played in her enduring legacy. Despite her outwardly modest and humble image, Amelia was fiercely driven and impossibly brave, a lifelong feminist and trailblazer in her personal and professional life. Putnam, the so-called “PT Barnum of publishing” was a bookselling visionary—but often pushed his authors to extreme lengths in the name of publicity, and no one bore that weight more than Amelia. Their ahead-of-its time partnership supported her grand ambitions—but also pressed her into more and more treacherous stunts to promote her books, influencing a certain recklessness up to and including her final flight.
Earhart is a captivating figure to many, but the truth about her life is often overshadowed by myth and legend. In this cinematic new account, Laurie Gwen Shapiro emphasizes Earhart’s multifaceted human side, her struggles, and her authentic aspirations, the truths behind her brave pursuits and the compromises she made to fit into societal expectations. Drawing from a trove of new sources including undiscovered audio interviews, The Aviator and the Showman is a gripping and passionate tale of adventure, colorful characters, hubris, and a complex and a vivid portrait of a marriage that shaped the trajectory of an iconic life.
©2025 Laurie Gwen Shapiro (P)2025 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Laurie Gwen Shapiro has dug deep into the archives, and emerged with an exhilarating tale of the adventurous life of Amelia Earhart and the remarkable relationship that helped to forge her legend. Yet Shapiro goes even further—stripping away the myths and revealing something far more profound and intricate and true. The Aviator and the Showman is one terrific book.”—David Grann, New York Times bestselling author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon
“This profoundly researched, gripping journey is a must read. Filled with stunning details of the courageous life of feminist adventurer, politically radical, and generous social worker Amelia Earhart, as well as her self-serving promoter husband, and their networks of friends and allies, The Aviator and the Showman is captivating and heartening.”—Blanche Wiesen Cook, New York Times bestselling author of Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1-3
“I thought I understood the story of Amelia Earhart. I could not have been more wrong. As Shapiro proves in this irresistible book, the full tale is so much more thrilling, inspiring, and outrageous than even the most ardent fan might imagine. Read it. It is a wild ride!”—Candice Millard, New York Times bestselling author of River of the Gods
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By: Tim Weiner
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The Aviator
- By: Eugene Vodolazkin, Lisa C. Hayden - translator, Gabrielle de Cuir - director
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki, Gabrielle de Cuir, John Rubinstein
- Length: 13 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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A man wakes up in a hospital bed, with no idea who he is or how he came to be there. The only information the doctor shares with his patient is his name: Innokenty Petrovich Platonov. As memories slowly resurface, Innokenty begins to build a vivid picture of his former life as a young man in Russia in the early 20th century, living through the turbulence of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. But soon, only one question remains: How can he remember the start of the 20th century, when the pills by his bedside were made in 1999?
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A MASTERPIECE
- By William Collins on 07-14-18
By: Eugene Vodolazkin, and others
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Captain Kidd
- A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal
- By: Samuel Marquis
- Narrated by: Shawn Compton
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Captain William Kidd stands as one of the most notorious "pirate" outlaws ever, but his legend is tainted by a bed of lies. Having captivated imaginations for more than three hundred years and inspired many stories about pirates, troubling questions remain. Was he really a criminal or is the truth more inconvenient: that he was a buccaneer's worst nightmare, a revered pirate hunter turned fall guy for scheming politicians?
By: Samuel Marquis
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A Marriage at Sea
- A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
- By: Sophie Elmhirst
- Narrated by: Marisa Calin
- Length: 5 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He’s a loner, awkward and obsessive; she’s charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream – as we all dream – of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away? Most of us begin and end with the daydream. But Maurice began to study nautical navigation. Maralyn made detailed lists of provisions. And in June 1972, they set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank.
By: Sophie Elmhirst
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The Aviator's Wife
- A Novel
- By: Melanie Benjamin
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 16 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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For much of her life, Anne Morrow, the shy daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, has stood in the shadows of those around her, including her millionaire father and vibrant older sister, who often steals the spotlight. Then Anne, a college senior with hidden literary aspirations, travels to Mexico City to spend Christmas with her family. There she meets Colonel Charles Lindbergh, fresh off his celebrated 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic. Enthralled by Charles’s assurance and fame, Anne is certain the celebrated aviator has scarcely noticed her. But she is wrong.
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The Megalomaniac's Wife
- By Audrey on 01-19-13
By: Melanie Benjamin
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The Stowaway
- A Young Man's Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica
- By: Laurie Gwen Shapiro
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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It was 1928: a time of illicit booze, of Gatsby and Babe Ruth, of freewheeling fun. The Great War was over, and American optimism was higher than the stock market. What better moment to launch an expedition to Antarctica, the planet's final frontier? The night before the expedition's flagship launched, Billy Gawronski - a skinny, first-generation New York City high schooler desperate to escape a dreary future in the family upholstery business - jumped into the Hudson River and snuck aboard. Could he get away with it?
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A Nice Little Story About A Nice Young Man...
- By Gillian on 01-23-18
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One More Good Flight
- The Amelia Earhart Tragedy
- By: Ric Gillespie
- Narrated by: J. Rodney Turner
- Length: 18 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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This book is the product of The Earhart Project, a thirty-four-year investigation of the Earhart tragedy by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. TIGHAR investigators had no agenda. They were not out to advocate, excuse, honor, or impugn. They saw the Earhart disappearance as an aviation accident and reasoned the answer to its cause and outcome should be discoverable if they could find, assemble, and analyze the relevant data.
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Hard evidence, delivered by an active, engaging narrator
- By Sheryl McCallister on 11-09-24
By: Ric Gillespie
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Nations Apart
- How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America
- By: Colin Woodard
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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To truly grasp the roots of America’s political polarization, economic inequality, public health crises, and democratic collapse, we must examine the country’s longstanding regional divides. In Nations Apart, Colin Woodard—an expert on North American regionalism and European ethnonationalism —delves into how centuries-old settlement patterns and the cultural geography they created have shaped today’s most contentious policy debates and brought American democracy to the brink.
By: Colin Woodard
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Midnight on the Potomac
- The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America
- By: Scott Ellsworth
- Narrated by: Scott Ellsworth
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Told with a thrilling pace, New York Times bestselling author and historian Scott Ellsworth has written the most compelling new book about the Civil War in years. Focusing on the last, desperate months of the war, when the outcome was far from certain, Midnight on the Potomac is a story of titanic battles, political upheaval, and the long-forgotten Confederate terror war against the loyal citizens of the North.
By: Scott Ellsworth
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Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last - Second Edition
- By: Mike Campbell
- Narrated by: Bill Hemberger
- Length: 15 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Nearly everything the American public has seen, read, and heard in the media for nearly 80 years about the so-called Amelia Earhart mystery is intentionally false or inadvertently misleading. The widely accepted myth that the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan during their ill-fated world-flight attempt in July 1937 is among the greatest aviation mysteries of the 20th century is an abject lie, the result of decades of government propaganda that continues unabated to this day.
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Very Convincing
- By Troy A. on 01-21-22
By: Mike Campbell
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The Road That Made America
- Travels on America's First Frontier Highway
- By: James Dodson
- Narrated by: James Dodson
- Length: 15 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In the bestselling tradition of Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail and Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, The Road That Made America is a lively, epic account of one of the greatest untold stories in our nation’s history—the eight-hundred-mile long Great Wagon Road that 18th-century American settlers forged from Philadelphia to Georgia that expanded the country dramatically in the decades before we ventured west.
By: James Dodson
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The Mailman
- My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home
- By: Stephen Starring Grant
- Narrated by: Stephen Starring Grant
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Steve Grant was laid off in March of 2020. He was fifty and had cancer, so he needed health insurance, fast. Which is how he found himself a rural letter carrier in Appalachia, back in his old hometown. Suddenly, he was the guy with the goods, delivering dog food and respirators and lube and heirloom tomato seeds and Lord of the Rings replica swords. He transported chicken feed to grandmothers living alone in the mountains and forded a creek with a refrigerator on his back. But while he carried the mail, he also carried a whole lot more than just the mail.
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Great listen! Interesting on many levels
- By NMwritergal on 07-11-25
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Victory '45
- The End of the War in Eight Surrenders
- By: James Holland, Al Murray
- Narrated by: Al Murray
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In May 1945 and then again in August and early September, the seemingly endless World War II finally came to a close in eight dramatic surrender ceremonies, six in Europe and the last two in Japan. On the 80th anniversary of those historic moments, celebrated historians James Holland and Al Murray chronicle these momentous events in turn, focusing especially on the human dramas behind each surrender and relating stories and perspectives on the end of the war that have not previously been told.
By: James Holland, and others
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The Beast in the Clouds
- The Roosevelt Brothers's Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda
- By: Nathalia Holt
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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During the 1920s, dozens of expeditions scoured the Chinese and Tibetan wilderness in search of the panda bear, a beast that many believed did not exist. When the two eldest sons of President Theodore Roosevelt sought the bear in 1928, they had little hope of success. Together with a team of scientists and naturalists, they accomplished what a decade of explorers could not, ultimately introducing the panda to the West. In the process, they documented a vanishing world and set off a new era of conservation biology.
By: Nathalia Holt