Nellie vs. Elizabeth: Two Daredevil Journalists' Breakneck Race Around the World by Kate Hannigan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nellie vs. Elizabeth: Two Daredevil Journalists' Breakneck Race Around the World by Kate Hannigan Elizabeth Bush Hannigan, Kate Nellie vs. Elizabeth: Two Daredevil Journalists' Breakneck Race Around the World; illus. by Rebecca Gibbon. Calkins Creek, 2022 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781684373772 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781635925548 $11.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R 5-8 yrs On November 14, 1889, Nellie Bly headed eastward in the a.m., and Elizabeth Bisland headed westward in the p.m.—two female journalists attempting to break the fictional circumnavigation record set in Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, and to make their respective publications lots of money. Although their rivalry has already found its way into picture books, Hannigan's text and Gibbon's ink and colored pencil illustrations not only hit the land and sea highlights of the race but also effectively compare and contrast the personalities of the racers. Readers see brash Bly fast-talking her editors into financially backing the adventure, while Bisland's editors convince their genteel writer to take up the same challenge. Bly uses her [End Page 153] precious downtime shopping for a monkey, while Bisland purchases silk dresses. Both women enthuse over a wide world little known to their readers—when not seasick from their respective voyages. A host of brief, breathless quotations from periodicals, commentators, and the subjects themselves offer insight into how the race was experienced by late nineteenth-century media consumers. An author's note alerts readers that the staged frenemy coverage masked just how much Bly and Bisland had in common, from obstacles both faced as women working in male-dominated journalism to their deaths by pneumonia and their interments in the same cemetery. Also included are brief biographies of ten female investigative journalists from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, a chatty note by Gibbons on her research, and a bibliography. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois