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Who would be the first aviator to singlehandedly journey completely around the world? That was all anyone wished to know in the summertime of 1933, when Wiley Post and Jimmie Mattern set out from New York in a pair of wood-and-canvas propeller planes. Post, a one-eyed Oklahoma plantation boy with a needy past, was as comfortable in the cockpit as he was socially uncomfortable back on the floor. Mattern was a Hollywood stunt pilot and interpersonal sidekick of Howard Hughes who had fallen on hard times, and an accident-prone daredevil who'd walked away from more plane crashes than he could count. These were friends as well as rivals, members of a little fraternity of aviators - their circle included Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart - at the same time when flight was still a perilous business. Each was decided to overcome one of the last frontiers in a speedily civilizing world-and neither recognized the dangers that lay forward. In Cloud Racers, Adam L. Penenberg tells the storyplot of Post's and Mattern's rollicking journey from the canyons of Manhattan to the wilds of the Russian Arctic and again, and brings back again to life a time in which the sky remained a location of puzzle and wonder.
