Cloud Racers

by Adam L. Penenberg

Who would be the first aviator to singlehandedly fly all the way around the globe? That was all anyone wanted to know in the summer 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 farm boy with a desperate past, was as comfortable in the cockpit as he was socially awkward back on the ground. Mattern was a Hollywood stunt pilot and social 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. They were friends as well as rivals, members of a small fraternity of aviators—their circle included Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart—at a time when flight was still a perilous business. Each was determined to conquer one of the last frontiers in a rapidly civilizing world—and neither knew the dangers that lay ahead.

In Cloud Racers, Adam L. Penenberg tells the story of Post's and Mattern's rollicking journey from the canyons of Manhattan to the wilds of the Russian Arctic and back again, and brings back to life an era in which the sky remained a place of mystery and wonder.

73 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 29, 2014

About the author

Adam L. Penenberg is a journalism professor at New York University who has written for Fast Company, Forbes, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, Slate, Playboy, and the Economist. A former senior editor at Forbes and a reporter for Forbes.com, Penenberg garnered national attention in 1998 for unmasking serial fabricator Stephen Glass of the New Republic. Penenberg’s story was a watershed for online investigative journalism and portrayed in the film Shattered Glass (Steve Zahn plays Penenberg).

Penenberg has publishedseveral books that have been optioned for the movies and serialized in the New York Times Magazine, Wired UK, and the Financial Times , and won a Deadline Club Award for feature reporting for his Fast Company story “Revenge of the Nerd,” which looked at the future of moviemaking. He hasappeared on NBC’s The Today Show as well as on CNN and all the major news networks,and been quoted about media and technology in the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, Wired News, Ad Age, Marketwatch, Politico.