A sometimes-engaging memoir of a space-travel technician that’s hampered by occasional banalities.
In this debut, Miller recounts his life on a farm just after the Great Depression and his later work on space shuttles.
The author describes himself as a “redheaded, freckle-faced, bashful, shy stuttering kid” who grew up in Wasco, California, with parents who had emigrated from Switzerland. A “self-made historian,” he followed the events of World War II closely—he was a middle school student at the time—and he came to love studying the planes, especially the military aircraft, that he saw flying overhead. On his parents’ farm, he milked cows; he found the experience so difficult that it hardened his resolve to attend Bakersfield College. There, Miller initially struggled with depression, but things changed when he reconnected with fellow student Dorothy Alice Worley, a girl whom he’d dated in high school. They married shortly before he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, to finish his mathematics degree, which he did, in 1953. Dorothy gave birth to the first of their eventual eight children as Miller began his career at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. Even his limited experience with computing in college had shown him that “Computers were the way to go,” and at the Air Force base, he worked on early computer programs to evaluate aircraft performance; he later became chief of the Technical Support Division overseeing the testing of the space shuttle. Over the course of this remembrance, Miller offers some compelling historical details and technical information, including his memories of hearing about the bombing of Pearl Harbor when he was a young boy and his encounters with early computer-programming software as an adult. He also presents intriguing tidbits from his and his spouse’s personal histories; Dorothy’s family tree, for instance, extends back to early California settlers. However, the chronology of the memoir’s first half is somewhat erratic and difficult to follow, and the second half dwells on uninteresting details at times, as when the author reproduces organizational charts from the base where he worked.
A sometimes-engaging memoir of a space-travel technician that’s hampered by occasional banalities.Pub Date: July 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79604-836-0
Page Count: 340
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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