A fresh, enthusiastic history of the moon mission to be read alongside Douglas Brinkley’s American Moonshot and other recent...
Marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a close look at the scientific and technological challenges that needed to be overcome to make it possible—achievements that regrettably have been “mostly invisible.”
Rather than focus on the astronauts, journalist Fishman (The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, 2011, etc.) offers lively profiles of many tireless, imaginative, and innovative scientists, engineers, and technicians who contributed to the Apollo mission from May 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would send a man to the moon by the end of the decade, until July 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto lunar dust. Kennedy’s proposal stemmed not from an adventuresome spirit but from Cold War urgency: He wanted to beat the Russians in the space race and demonstrate the triumph of freedom over communism. However, that triumph was hardly certain; NASA, surprised by Kennedy’s announcement, gave the U.S. only a 50-50 chance of success. As Fishman amply shows, the nation was woefully unprepared for space flight. Astronauts had “exactly 15 minutes of manned spaceflight experience,” and rockets, landing ships, navigation equipment, spacesuits, and a new generation of computers and software all had to be invented from scratch. In the 1960s, computers took up whole rooms, required huge amounts of electricity, and could not run for more than a few hours without failing. The MIT Instrumentation Lab, headed by the irrepressible Charles Draper and his brilliant colleague Bill Tindall, was charged with inventing and building flight computers, writing and wiring their software, and training astronauts in their use, and 20,00 companies contributed to the construction and assembly of the spacecraft. For eight years, 410,000 people put in 2.8 billion work hours to make the flight possible. As the author sees it, those efforts—long before the innovations emanating from Silicon Valley—ushered in the digital age, making technology “a tool of everyday life.”
A fresh, enthusiastic history of the moon mission to be read alongside Douglas Brinkley’s American Moonshot and other recent books commemorating the 50th anniversary.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0629-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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