A delightful slice of NASA life.
The inner workings of NASA through an enthusiastic account of an interplanetary probe to a distant moon.
Although space travel hasn’t enraptured the U.S. since the 1969 Apollo moon landing, NASA continues to accomplish great feats, and more are in the offing, including this book’s subject: the 2024 launch of a multibillion-dollar spacecraft to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa. To puzzled readers, journalist and Army veteran Brown explains that the Galileo probe, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003, discovered a liquid water ocean beneath Europa’s icy surface. Life requires liquid water, and despite a torrent of probes and landers, none has turned up on Mars. No president since Lyndon Johnson has shown a genuine interest in space travel, a feeling shared by Congress with rare exceptions, including one of Brown’s unlikely heroes, a conservative from Texas. Furthermore, when Congress doles out tax money, anything involving astronauts takes priority. Even space buffs struggle to name a discovery produced by the manned space station, but robotic probes often return spectacular discoveries. Despite this, unmanned programs struggle for attention in this “astronaut-led, astronaut-centric organization,” but its scientists and engineers contain many brilliant workaholics. Brown delivers breathless biographies of a dozen as he describes their effort, now passing 20 years, to explore Europa. Since the 1990s, they have seen several proposals approved and then killed, but the Europa Clipper mission will probably happen for the only reason space programs happen: Congress approved the money. Readers will roll their eyes but keep reading as Brown engagingly describes the cutthroat NASA political landscape, in which Mars gets the most attention, leaving advocates of other planets fuming. Leading-edge technology usually goes over budget, but Congress rarely makes up the difference, so high priority space programs that run short extract money from other programs and sometimes get them cancelled. Few experts expect the 2024 launch date to hold, but some time after 2030, we may find evidence of fish on Europa.
A delightful slice of NASA life.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-265442-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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