Don't Die In Bed: The Brief, Intense Life of Richard Halliburton

In a youthful America Richard Halliburton praised youth while a misfit, a rebel, who became wildly successful because of his wildly improbable life. He swam the Panama Canal as the S.S. Halliburton. He sailed across the Pacific in a Chinese junk. He starred in a 1930s Hollywood movie. He witnessed Japanese troops invading China. In an open-cockpit biplane he flew across the Sahara Desert to Timbuktu, looking for gasoline barrels hidden by the sand. His ship was boarded by pirates. He risked arrest in the 1930s Soviet Union and interviewed an assassin of Czar Nicholas and family, confirming what happened to the Royals, but few believed him. (But in 1979 Alexander Avdonin confirmed it.) A restless man, his energy drove him in search of new adrenalin highs. He was famous in his time, more than Amelia Earhart, and now he is forgotten. Of his fame he was humble enough to know he would become forgotten.