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Informationen zum Autor Artis Henderson 's work has appeared in the New York Times , The Daily Beast , Reader's Digest and Sierra , among others. Her first memoir, Unremarried Widow , was a New York Times Editors' Choice and named to more than 10 Best of the Year lists. Artis has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, the Columbia School of Journalism, and the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A certified master naturalist and advanced open water diver, she splits her time between Florida and Portugal. Klappentext An exhilarating memoir by a daughter uncovering the secret of her father's rags-to-riches story, from poor farm boy to international drug smuggler, and the many mysteries surrounding his sudden death by plane crash. Nothing seemed awry the morning that five-year-old Artis Chester climbed into her father's plane: this was simply their usual Saturday bonding. But moments after they take off into the crystal blue sky, the plane plummets to the ground, leaving Artis with a broken body--and without a father. This tragedy would be enough to shape any young life, but Artis's world is further turned upside down when, shortly thereafter, the IRS arrives to seize all her family's possessions. Lamar Chester had always had an air of mystery about him, but now her mother won't say a word. He'd been a dashing commercial pilot, settling his family in a palatial estate in Georgia, amassing a collection of boats, cars, a private plane and even a group of islands in the Bahamas. But Artis, as a young child, had thought little of it before the accident. It would take years for Artis to begin to uncover the truth: Lamar had made his multi-million-dollar fortune smuggling drugs between the Bahamas and Florida in the 70s and 80s, and many of his compatriots believed that he had been covertly working for the Feds. As more and more details emerge, it becomes clear that the plane crash that took Lamar's life was not a simple pilot error but perhaps a plot by high-ranking government officials to cover up crimes that far exceeded Lamar's drug smuggling. In the page-turning adventures of Flying Blind, this critically acclaimed memoirist vividly chronicles her father's outsized life, including his rise from poor farm boy to one of America's most prolific drug smugglers, probes for the first time the suspicious circumstances of his death, and ultimately offers a compassionate, clear-eyed look at the people left in his wake. Zusammenfassung In the vein of Small Fry or Priestdaddy, No Ordinary Bird is a compelling father-daughter story that reads like true crime, haunted by a question the dashing and mysterious Lamar Chester had always taught his daughter to ask: “ How do you tell the good guys from the bad? ” Artis was five when a plane crash killed her beloved father. For years, it was simply called “the accident.” But many things weren’t getting discussed. Like Lamar himself—a swashbuckling, larger-than-life pilot, a doting father and husband, and the most popular farmer in Georgia. Or that the IRS had immediately taken everything: the chickens, the airplanes, the islands in the Bahamas. . . . Afterwards, Artis and her mother broke contact with everyone and fled, rebuilding from the bottom up as if Lamar’s big, wild life had never happened. Years later, a friend tells Artis Lamar’s plane was sabotaged: her father had been one of the biggest drug smugglers in Miami in the 1970s. At the time of his death, he was about to testify in a trial that had swept up everyone from the Prime Minister of the Bahamas, to a US district attorney, to the Colombian drug cartels. But the deeper Artis digs, the more unexpected the story becomes. Beyond the dramatic betrayals, dangerous drug lords, and geopolitical intrigue...
