BOOK REVIEW: Eighty Days

Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

4.5 stars.

When I was a child, I had a brief children's biography of Nellie Bly. While it didn't go into great detail about her life, it did talk about how she got herself committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island and, especially, her later trip around the world. I read it over and over again and, when I got older, I was always surprised that there wasn't much written about her -- I never really sought anything out, to be fair, but a lot of books cross my path on a daily basis and I never saw one about her. I was thrilled when I saw the announcement for Eighty Days and the book shot right to the top of my to-read list.

Eighty Days not only tells the story of Nellie Bly, it also introduces us to Elizabeth Bisland -- while I knew about Bly's trip around the world for Joseph Pulitzer's World newspaper, I'd never known that Cosmopolitan (a much different magazine in those days), upon hearing of the stunt, sent Bisland, their own reporter, around the world in the opposite direction in the hopes that she would beat Bly.

Bly and Bisland were very different women, but both were largely self-made and well-known in their day, and the intersection of their stories is fascinating. Sections of the book detail the increasingly sensational stunts that the New York newspapers of the day attempted to pull off in an attempt to win readers; other sections; other parts read like a travelogue, as seen through the eyes of two women who were not seasoned travelers and yet set out to beat Phileas Fogg's fictional record for a circumnavigation of the globe. They traveled on the fastest steamships of their day, traversed the newly-built Suez Canal, took rickshaw rides in the Orient, and survived harrowingly fast trips through the Rockies on the newly-completed Transcontinental Railroad.

Following their return to New York, Bly found her life changed drastically, and never again found the fame and public adulation that she enjoyed during her trip. Bisland's star did not fall as far, but she, too, fell into relative obscurity.

I found Eighty Days to be a fascinating and absorbing read. At times it fell into some repetitiveness (due, no doubt, to the nature of Bly and Bisland's dueling trips) so it did drag a bit in places, but the content more than made up for its shortcomings.

Review copy received from the publisher via NetGalley.

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