A deeply researched, expertly written account of the fascinating interplay between evolution and exploration.
Life launches into the unknown.
Some 3.7 billion years ago, life awoke on our rocky blue planet and, slowly but surely, oozed, swam, scuttled, and crawled into every ecological niche it could find. Eventually, it leapt right off the face of the Earth. Scharf, an astrobiologist and senior scientist at NASA, tells the awesome story of biology’s boldest migration—from the thinkers who cracked the mathematics of motion, mechanics, and gravity to the engineers who built spacecraft and robotic probes and solved the challenges of astro-navigation and communications. Now, citizens of more than 48 countries have ventured into orbit, not to mention chimpanzees, dogs, rabbits, wasps, tortoises, cockroaches, and jellyfish. Scharf casts this outward movement as an evolutionary imperative—the “expansion of living things into a narrow shell around the Earth and along a tiny thread of space to the Moon”—that will inevitably press onward to Mars, asteroids, and beyond, just by nature doing what it does. Consider, for example, that any water on the Moon may have been produced on Earth by photosynthetic organisms and scattered to the lunar soil by solar winds back when the Moon was closer. Through electrolysis, that water could be decomposed into hydrogen for fuel and oxygen for breathing. “If humans end up harvesting that water for the exploration of space,” Scharf writes, “it will be a case of life providing its own means to move beyond the confines of a single planet and its natural satellite.” This makes for a compelling narrative—but the thing about evolution is that we evolved to live here. Already in Low Earth Orbit, Scharf notes, astronauts aboard the International Space Station suffer “puffy head, bird legs syndrome,” scarring of the heart tissue and “space diarrhea,” and that’s just from the change in gravity. Far harsher conditions await us farther from home. Scharf may be right that “life’s relentless, mindless impetus to extend itself” will culminate in what he calls the Dispersal with a capital D. But as the fossil record shows, extending beyond your niche can also land you extinct. It was for good reason that Goldilocks, having found the bed that was just right, stayed there.
A deeply researched, expertly written account of the fascinating interplay between evolution and exploration.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781541604179
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward, carefully detailed presentation of how ``fruit comes from flowers,'' from winter's snow-covered buds through pollination and growth to ripening and harvest. Like the text, the illustrations are admirably clear and attractive, including the larger-than-life depiction of the parts of the flower at different stages. An excellent contribution to the solidly useful ``Let's-Read-and-Find-Out-Science'' series. (Nonfiction/Picture book. 4-9)
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-020055-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts.
But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill.
But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979
ISBN: 0312427565
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
BOOK TO SCREEN
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