Keith O’Brien on the Radical Lives of Five Incredible Pilots

Keith O’Brien’s Fly Girls uncovers an overlooked period of aviation, exploring the lives of five disparate female pilots from the 1920s and 30s. Through exhaustive research and sweeping prose, O’Brien brings these remarkable stories to life, recounting the risks these women faced on and off the airfield. Critics have heaped praise upon the book, with The New York Times noting that “O’Brien’s prose reverberates with fiery crashes, then stings with the tragedy of lives lost in the cockpit and sometimes, equally heartbreaking, on the ground” and The Wall Street Journal stating that “O’Brien has recovered a fascinating chapter not just in feminism and aviation but in 20th-century American history.”