A book I know I'm going to get

Earlier this year, I wrote about Nellie Bly's trip around the world (my post was "Nellie Bly returns"). Yesterday, there was a fascinating show on National Public Radio's The Diane Rehm Show. Diane Rehm interviewed Matthew Goodman the author of a book titled Eighty Days. In it, he recounts the race around the globe between Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland who was working for a rival publication and traveling the other way around the world. I learned that Nellie didn't even know she was in a race with a real competitor until she was half way around the world. She thought she was only trying to beat the eighty days it took the fictional Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's story.

I told you a bit about the story in my earlier post as well as a bit about Nellie herself (born Elizabeth Cochran, later changing the spelling to Cochrane and then later taking the pen name Nellie Bly). I even pointed out how to get Nellie's own account of the trip but I think you'll enjoy this book even more. It goes into much more detail and also tells the equally interesting story of Elizabeth Bisland and her trip the other way around the world. Mr. Goodman also tells a lot about how newspapers were run back in the late 1800s and while a lot of things have changed since then, he points out that a lot hasn't changed much. He researched this topic extensively and reports from primary sources and can be a bit more impartial than Nellie can be about her own trip. It sounds like I've read the book already but I haven't. I got all this from the show.

If you go to this link at The Diane Rehm Show, you can listen to the story by clicking on the Listen button. You can read the transcript by, surprisingly, clicking on the Transcript button on that same page. You can read an excerpt from the book there, too. I know I'll be buying it the next time I'm book shopping.