HAPPY BOTTOM RIDING CLUB, THE(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Pancho Barnes was a force of nature, a woman who lived a big,
messy, colorful, unconventional life. She ran through three
fortunes, four husbands, and countless lovers. She outflew Amelia
Earhart, outsmarted Howard Hughes, outdrank the Mexican Army, and
out- maneuvered the U.S. government. In The Happy Bottom Riding
Club, award-winning author Lauren Kessler tells the story of a
high-spirited, headstrong woman who was proud of her successes,
unabashed by her failures, and the architect of her own
legend.
        
　　Florence “Pancho” Barnes was a California heiress who inherited a
love of flying from her grandfather, a pioneer balloonist in the
Civil War. Faced with a future of domesticity and upper-crust
pretensions, she ran away from her responsibilities as wife and
mother to create her own life. She cruised South America. She
trekked through Mexico astride a burro. She hitchhiked halfway
across the United States. Then, in the late 1920s, she took to the
skies, one of a handful of female pilots.
        
　　She was a barnstormer, a racer, a cross-country flier, and a
Hollywood stunt pilot. She was, for a time, “the fastest woman on
earth,” flying the fastest civilian airplane in the world. She was
an intimate of movie stars, a * doctor for the great director
Erich von Stroheim, and, later in life, a drinking buddy of the
supersonic jet jockey Chuck Yeager. She ran a wild and wildly
successful desert watering hole known as the Happy Bottom Riding
Club, the raucous bar and grill depicted in The Right Stuff.
        
　　In The Happy Bottom Riding Club, Lauren Kessler presents a
portrait, both authoritative and affectionate, of a woman who
didn’t play by women’s rules, a woman of large
appetites–emotional, financial, and sexual–who called herself
“the greatest conversation piece that ever existed.”

　　Lauren Kessler is the author of nine books, among them
Stubborn Twig, which received the Frances Fuller Victor Award for
the year’s best work of literary nonfiction. She directs the
grad-uate program in literary nonfiction at the University of
Oregon in Eugene, where she lives with her husband and three
children.

　　”The hard-drinking, sexually promiscuous pilot and adventuress
Florence ‘Pancho’ Barnes exploded every feminine stereotype on the
books. Thank you, Lauren Kessler, for telling her story with the
grace and exuberance it deserves.”
　　—Barbara Ehrenreich

　　”Pancho Barnes is an unsung American eccentric who helped keep
the ‘wild’ in Wild West. With tremendous zest, insight, and
intelligence, Lauren Kessler has given us a compelling tale of a
great woman who wasn’t afraid to make life synonymous with
risk.”
　　—Karen Karbo, author of Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me