Readers frustrated at the trickle of news from China (the only nation with an active manned space program) will thrill at...
An enthusiastic account of the pursuit of “a holy grail—a technology with the potential to dramatically lower the cost of space travel.”
The United States no longer has a manned space program, and the government has not shown any immediate plans to fund another. However, a quartet of billionaires has stepped in to fill the void, writes Washington Post space and defense staff writer Davenport (As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard, 2009) in this well-researched account of the efforts of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Paul Allen. “If NASA, or Congress, or any president wouldn’t stand up as John F. Kennedy did in 1961 when he promised to send a man to the moon within a decade,” writes the author, “then this class of entrepreneurs would attempt it.” First off the mark, in 2000, was Amazon’s Bezos, whose startup is building a reusable rocket for suborbital flights; the first manned launch is scheduled for 2018. Microsoft billionaire Allen invested in SpaceShipOne, which, in 2004, became the first privately funded manned craft to reach space. Virgin’s Branson took over to develop SpaceShipTwo, which will carry paying passengers on suborbital flights in a few years. Since founding SpaceX in 2002, Tesla’s Musk, “the brash hare” in this race, has focused his attention on Mars. His privately built reusable rockets regularly supply the Space Station; soon they will deliver astronauts, and he has announced plans to fly men around the moon this year.
Readers frustrated at the trickle of news from China (the only nation with an active manned space program) will thrill at this lucid, detailed, and admiring account of wealthy space buffs who are spending their own money, making headlines, producing genuine technical advances, and resurrecting the yearning to explore the cosmos.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61039-829-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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