Kansas-born girl, Amelia Earhart discovers the thrill of aviation at age 23. Within 12 years she goes on to win the Distinguished Flying Cross for being the first woman to pilot a plane solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Amelia and her husband/business partner George Putnam have an enduring marriage that could not be broken by her determination to fly, nor her passionate affair with Gene Vidal. At age 39, she sets out on an attempt to circumnavigate...

This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides - or are chosen. A world in which good rides on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old...