“I’m a journalist, so I’m always looking for good stories,’’ said Keith O’Brien. The impetus for his second book came from a book he’d grabbed to read on a flight: Lily Koppel’s “The Astronaut Wives Club.’’ He was stunned when he came to a paragraph that mentioned an all-female airplane race. “It just sort of stopped me,’’ he said. “It lodged in the back of my brain.’’
The former Boston Globe reporter found himself tracking down records buried in microfilm and old newspapers. “I realized there was a whole world here, an entire world populated by characters that had been forgotten,’’ said O’Brien. The result is “Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History,’’ O’Brien’s true account of the almost unbelievable sport of air racing. The races were “extremely dangerous, and enormously popular,’’ O’Brien said. “Imagine NASCAR racing today, if someone died or was seriously injured every other weekend.’’
One of the women he profiles in the book became a feminist icon (Amelia Earhart), but the others, O’Brien said, “left a trail that was much harder to follow.’’ Still, the more he learned the more he knew the story mattered. “Women were a distinct minority in the sky,’’ he said, both then and now (currently, around 7 percent of American commercial pilots are women).
O’Brien acknowledges that he can’t understand women’s issues the same way a woman can. Still, as a man “raised by strong, independent women,’’ he said he hopes to bring dogged research and empathy to all his work. “To me, this story is for anyone who’s ever been told, ‘You’re not good enough; you don’t belong here; you can’t do this,’ ’’ he said. “And it’s for anyone who’s ever stood up to those naysayers or stared down those kinds of bullies and said, ‘You don’t know me; I think you’re wrong.’ ’’ I think that’s a story that pretty much anyone can appreciate.’’
O’Brien will read today at 2 p.m. at Silver Unicorn Bookstore at 12 Spruce St., Acton.
Kate Tuttle, president of the National Book Critics Circle, can be reached at kate.tuttle@gmail.com.
