by Alfred Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2019
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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