Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World is a nonfiction book without a single boring moment in it. It’s a great portrait of the two women and of a world experiencing change at a dizzying rate.

In 1873, Jules Verne published Around the World in Eighty Days. In this novel, Phileas Fogg and his servant Passpartout make a bet that they can go all the way around the world in eighty days. They plan to travel by rail and by steamer ship. Due to unforeseen complications, they also travel by wind-powered sledge and by elephant. They do NOT travel by balloon, although the 1956 movie adaptation added an iconic hot-air balloon sequence.

Many developments made rapid transit possible for regular people in real life. The Transcontinental Railroad was finished in 1869, the India railways were linked together in 1870, and the Suez Canal was finished in 1869. The British Empire was at its height. In the US, the Gilded Age was shaking up financial markets. The rich liked to travel and the poor were desperate to look for jobs and food.

Nellie Bly was a newspaper reporter in New York who specialized in undercover work for The World. She proposed that she should make a trip around the world in eighty days, but her editors vetoed this because she was a woman. But the newspaper owner saw an opportunity. Bly was on a ship with one day’s notice.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Bisland was quite happy working as the literary editor of Cosmopolitan. She had no particular wish to travel or to be famous or to engage in investigative journalism. However, her boss asked her to make a competing voyage during an 11AM meeting and put her on a train at 6PM that night. Bisland travelled the opposite direction from Bly, who was unaware that someone was racing her until far into the trip.

This book is consistently entertaining, whether talking about the background of the trip or relating the voyages of the women. A lot of what the women did was not terribly exciting. They rode in boats and they rode on trains. They fought seasickness, grime, unwanted suitors, and boredom. However, every time they had to make a connection from one mode of travel to another, there was a flurry of adrenaline and panic as they tried to catch their scheduled rides. Both women had several opportunities to get off the trains and boats and look around for a day or two. These sojourns are described in fascinating detail.

This book would be a fun read for anyone interested in the history of that time period, or for anyone interested in women’s history. It’s also a great travelogue. I must warn the reader that both Bly and Bisland had the prejudices of their day, although they both questioned colonialism. At almost every stop that wasn’t in the US, they saw the British Flag. The author takes the time to introduce at least some perspectives of people such as the Chinese in California who were so crucial to building the railroad, and the stokers in the ocean liners who sometimes went mad from the heat of the coal room and lept into the sea.

For me, the biography and the travelogue were the most interesting parts of the book. Seeing Hong Kong and Ceylon and Italy through the women’s eyes was truly fascinating. So were all the little weird things that happened during the trips: Nellie Bly bought a monkey that hated her. Bisland had to let a customs official unpack her trunk and she shut it again by jumping up and down on it with only a few minutes left to catch her train. Bly had a secret addiction to chewing gum and was thrilled to find some in Hong Kong. Bisland brought needlework to do on the boat. These details made the strange trip seem real.

I love books that make history feel personal and immediate. This one did a great job for me.