A hokey autobiography of American astronaut and moon-walker Cernan. Cernan commanded the last of the Apollo missions, number 17, destination Moon, where he and mission geologist Jack Schmitt took a walk. It was a long haul of a career to make those few steps—in all likelihood, a career exquisitely nuanced, serendipitous, and with a few tales to tell, but what gets served up here is Cernan the hayseed patriot. “The Cold War became the crucible in which my military career was forged” will tip readers off early as to where things are headed. Training in California, he experiences an earthquake and interprets it as “God’s way of saying, ‘Welcome to the real world, you nugget.’ “ Vietnam rages in the background, and Cernan makes note of it with such comments as, “the bloody battle of the Ia Drang Valley proved those little guys could fight us to a standstill.” He briefly hits a stride chronicling his space walk on an earlier mission—a truly hellacious, slow-motion episode, in which a welter of little glitches nearly kills him—and his profiles of the other pilots in the space program are easily the most entertaining parts of the book, although they too can be facile (of Walter Schirra, “He was a cold-nerved pilot, by God”). When he steps off the ladder of the lunar module and treads upon the surface of the Moon, he stays true to form—no poetry, just “Oh, my golly.” And questions of tone aside, there is too much lumber passing as prose in these pages (“Roger was a workaholic, and I guess we all were, but off-duty, he had a great sense of humor”), despite the assistance of amanuensis Daavis Even if Cernan is an aw-shucks kind of guy, this much corn makes his story a bland affair. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 22, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-19906-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
Atwood (The Robber Bride, 1993, etc.) is always at her worst when her acerbic sneer overwhelms other elements, and there is barely room for anything else in these short-short works. With the laundry-list mentality usually reserved for dead authors, this collection gathers up pieces that have appeared in magazines and earlier collections and simply regroups them according to a criterion that has more to do with brevity than quality. Most lack structure and read like beginning ideas rather than finished stories. Some try to turn fairy tales around, but they tend to be unfocused. In "Unpopular Gals," an "ugly stepsister" rails against fairy-tale conventions like well-behaved daughters and the fact that "there are never any evil stepfathers." In "There Was Once," the narrator tries to write a fairy tale but keeps backtracking to avoid sounding "passe" and inaccurate. "Women's Novels" also attempts literary revisionism, but its stabs at humor are blunt ("Women's novels leave out parts of the men as well. Sometimes it's the stretch between the belly button and the knees, sometimes it's the sense of humor"). "Making a Man" gives instructions for just that, and again, jokes about making males out of marzipan and gingerbread do not go any deeper. "Happy Endings" fares a little better with a list of possible scenarios for a love relationship, prefaced by the warning to read only the first "If you want a happy ending," but it is the exception among smug fluff like the poem "Let Us Now Praise Stupid Women" ("all those who dry their freshly shampooed poodles in the microwave") and "Liking Men," an examination of men and their parts that veers far off-track. Atwood has clearly grasped the differences between men and women, but her mistake lies in believing that she is the only one who has. Readers will resent paying what averages out to about ten dollars per hour for this.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-47110-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
Admirers of Warren will find this a welcome exaltation.
“She works on the inside, but she’s never considered herself an insider.” A celebratory biography of the “brand-name populist” who many commentators expect will run for president in 2020.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, writes Felix (Michelle Obama: A Photographic Journey, 2017, etc.), comes by her advocacy for the struggling middle class honestly. Born in Oklahoma, she grew up in a household run by parents who, though they considered themselves middle-class, were just a couple of paychecks away from financial disaster—as happened from time to time. Confronting those realities as a lawyer with substantial training in economics and as a public intellectual committed to conveying her findings so that readers everywhere could understand them, Warren has emerged as a leader of the left wing of the Democratic Party, as well as a senator from Massachusetts, a long journey from her beginnings as a middle-state conservative. Felix writes uncritically and sometimes breezily, addressing her subject as a familiar: “It’s a leap of faith to turn away from the sheltering walls of a university, and Elizabeth thought long and hard before jumping into the political chaos of the Bankruptcy Review Commission.” The book is best understood as a fan’s notes, though the author does a good job of digging evenhandedly into one of the central controversies surrounding Warren, the claim of Native American ancestry that has provided Donald Trump with the ugly slur “Pocahontas.” That controversy well merits the several pages Felix devotes to it, which, as she notes, could not be explained in a media atmosphere “in the business of sound-bite drama, not social analysis.” One can be sure that in the event that Warren declares for the presidency, the matter will be reignited, even as she has moved on to being a persistent—and persisting—critic of the rule of big money in electoral politics.
Admirers of Warren will find this a welcome exaltation.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4926-6528-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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