An original, impressionistic take on man’s first brief, off-world encounter.
Lago (Grand Canyon, 2015, etc.) imagines the moon landing from the moon’s perspective in this work of creative nonfiction.
The cratered surface of the moon may seem alien to people who are used to the landscapes of Earth, but in the grand scheme of things, its appearance represents the norm: “The whole universe is like the moon, chaotic and lifeless and mindless,” writes Lago in his prologue. “This is a universe of craters, of planets and moons saturated with craters, craters within craters, craters atop craters, craters ruining other craters.” Lago had this realization while watching a lunar eclipse in Verdun, France, where the craters made by World War I ordnance still pockmark the landscape—proof, perhaps, that mankind has internalized some universal forces of destruction. What follows is a meditation on what Earth looks like from the moon, particularly that strange time when an “asteroid” from our planet landed on the lunar surface—and two astronauts got out of it and began walking around. What must the moon have made of this strange encounter as it was presented with such oddities as symmetrical objects, gaseous oxygen, artificial light, and living organisms? How odd was it for its dust, which had sat undisturbed for millions of years, to suddenly take the shape of human footprints? Lago uses the moon to dislocate readers and ask them to consider everything from a new and remote perspective—from the effect of the moon’s gravity on water in the astronauts’ bodies to the moon’s relationship to calcium, gold, and glass to its role in the lives of owls and luna moths and its distinctly inhuman sense of silence and time. “Through the moon’s grey, cratered mirror,” he writes, evoking the epiphanies of Apollo XI astronauts, “we might finally be able to see ourselves clearly.” Lago’s prose is as controlled as a lunar module, and it often becomes quite lyrical: “The astronaut breathed deeply, deep into time, deep into Earth, deep into life, breathed with the lungs of whales, the throats of giraffes, the mouths of Rex, the noses of elephants, the voices of wrens, tapping the holy, cosmic winds that had given life to the gods themselves.” The author also slyly packs in quite a bit of information, including an explanation of moonquakes, a look at magnesium’s functions on Earth and on the moon, and an accounting of various lunar goddesses in human mythologies. Lago appears less interested in specific facts, however, than he is in capturing larger, less comprehensible properties of the moon and of existence in general. He divides the book into short chapters, each one a riff on a specific idea, such as what the concept of zero might mean on the moon; some are closer to poetic meditations. As such, the book’s style may not be every reader’s cup of tea, but it is successful in making the moon feel simultaneously alien and tactile. One can almost feel the moon dust between one’s fingers.
An original, impressionistic take on man’s first brief, off-world encounter.Pub Date: May 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60489-230-7
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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