A motivational journey for armchair astronauts and readers fascinated by the unlimited wingspan of human potential.
An intrepid aerospace engineer shares career insights and success stories achieved through focused teamwork.
Astronautic developer Steltzner’s inspiring chronicle of innovation and creativity, written with veteran co-author Patrick, begins with his rather indirect path to a management career with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He details his younger years spent enjoying the free-spirited 1960s and ’70s in the San Francisco Bay Area. Contending with a heavy-drinking father obsessed with failure, the author also struggled greatly in the classroom and in psychotherapy sessions to “explore my combination of extreme risk taking and minimal consciousness in school,” as bone-breaking stunts took precedence over passing grades. Though he initially dismissed college to hold out for rock-band stardom, a chance sighting of the constellation Orion spurred Steltzner to enroll in a local community college, which led to Caltech, where he graduated in the top 20 percent of his class. He then earned a master’s degree and a job at the JPL. “I wasn’t Elvis Costello,” he divulges, “and I wasn’t ever going to be, but I did have a job at the lab responsible for the bulk of the U.S. unmanned space effort.” As the book delves deeper into the author’s work on various multilayered, scientifically dense projects at the JPL, the text tends to stray into “spacecraft ops-speak,” which will delight seasoned technophiles but confound neophytes. Steltzner vividly describes his crowning achievement, a project 10 years in the making: the atmospheric navigation and meticulous landing of a six-wheeled rover called Curiosity (“the size of a MINI Cooper”) onto the surface of Mars in 2012. The rover used a revolutionary hovering cable apparatus called Sky Crane, which the author helped build, troubleshoot, and deploy. Steltzner’s enthusiastic, passionately written memoir is an insider’s guide to engineering wizardry and a testament to the effectiveness of team-minded engagement, rational problem-solving, and the concept of “making ideas reality.”
A motivational journey for armchair astronauts and readers fascinated by the unlimited wingspan of human potential.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59184-692-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Useful, credible and smart.
A handy guide to personal finance and a convincing argument for improved financial literacy.
Secrets is a near-encyclopedic compilation of financial advice from Mincher, a self-made multimillionaire. (He made his first million by the age of 25.) And though much of his wisdom derives solely from his own experience, the seven-figure investment portfolio that backs it up is difficult to deny. In many ways, the story of how the author made his money is as interesting as the financial counsel he provides. A born businessman, he formed his first company in high school and won awards as a young entrepreneur. He earned his fortune as the owner of a charter-bus service and, later, as a regional telecom baron. Mincher offers brief chapters on just about every conceivable area of financial inquiry, from credit checks to buying a car to investing in the stock market. His volume works more effectively as a reference than a how-to to be read in a few sittings. But as such it is very valuable indeed; clearly organized and helpfully broken up into bite-size sections, the information is easy to digest. Underpinning it all is the author’s fervent belief that most people need to know more about their money. Mincher has an autodidact’s ambivalence toward traditional education; a college drop-out, he preaches “street smarts” and inveighs a bit too frequently against odd targets like high-school calculus in his introduction. Nonetheless, his call for more and better financial education rings true, especially as subprime lenders have recently wreaked havoc on world economic markets by preying on the financially non-savvy.
Useful, credible and smart.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-9797003-0-9
Page Count: 426
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A penetrating look at the bitter controversy between animal rights activists and research scientists over the use of monkeys and chimpanzees in medical research. Given their proven intelligence, asks the author, can a chimp or monkey ``comprehend that it is being used by another species? It is not a question everyone wants to see answered.'' Blum, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the Sacramento Bee articles that led to this book, acknowledges that in tracing the history of primate research- -and she discusses several horrendous abuses—any accounting ``must include the knowledge gained, the human lives saved.'' But some researchers who recognize the animals' suffering and strive for more humane handling, such as Roger Fouts at Central Washington University, find themselves ostracized and refused government funding. Fouts, renowned for his sign language work with the chimp Washoe, has battled the National Institutes of Health for years, finally filing suit to challenge its way of regulating experimental animal facilities. His 1986 visit, along with famed chimpanzee specialist Jane Goodall, to a notorious Maryland laboratory conducting AIDS research brought enough negative publicity to force some changes in the way the animals are caged. Other researchers, like Tom Gordon, director at Yerkes Field Station (a ``monkey farm'' in Georgia), fault both animal activists ``for making the monkeys too human'' and scientists for treating them as mere mechanical objects. Primates' humanlike physiology (a chimp's DNA is 98.5% identical to a human's) renders them perhaps indispensable in AIDS research and other crucial medical experiments. But, as Blum shows, it is their humanlike nature and their intelligence that give rise to important questions about ethics and respect for life. As a solution, Blum has nothing better to offer than a vague suggestion for ``education programs'' aimed at reaching a ``troubled'' middle ground. But she brings the issues into sharp, disturbing focus.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-509412-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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