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    The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes
    Unavailable
    The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes
    Unavailable
    The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes
    Audiobook12 hours

    The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes

    Written by Lauren Kessler

    Narrated by Hollis McCarthy

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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 outmaneuvered the US 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 script 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".

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 14, 2019
    ISBN9780593103869
    Unavailable
    The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes
    Author

    Lauren Kessler

    Lauren Kessler is the author of ten books, among them the Los Angeles Times bestseller The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes and Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family. Kessler directs the graduate program in literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

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