This is a duel biography of Jackie Cochran and Jerrie Cobb, which I should be completely down for, but it wasn't a biography so much as a hagiography that took the subjects self-mythologising at face value, didn't endnote anything, and never showed that these woman could have had any flaws. It was very similar in tone to a gushy authorised biography, except that at least those are about living people, and the author here doesn't have to worry about her subjects getting mad at her, because they're super dead.

It's not that I want someone to paint either woman as villains, but they were both complicated, difficult women who had flaws and made mistakes, and I would like to hear more about that aspect of them. I would have also liked to hear more about the points of view of the women Cochran steamrolled over in her various power plays. Even from what little I know about this period in flight history, the author was basically leaving out everything that didn't make her subjects look good (for example: Cochran not letting black women apply for the WASPs), and it made it very hard for me to trust anything she did say.

The fact that she was also involved in a pretty big plagiarism scandal back in the day didn't inspire me to finish it. That she's a science blogger and youtube star surprises me not at all. This is very much the tone of a tumblr post about Heroines HIStory Doesn't Want You to Know About.

Read Promised the Moon by Stephanie Nolan instead.