An essential guide for any scientist or engineer hoping to attempt a feat of derring-do.
An aerospace engineer’s diary chronicles three years in the life of the interdisciplinary team that enabled the world’s highest sky dive.
In 2011, Alan Eustace, a pilot and avid sky diver, wanted to make a record-setting dive from 135,890 feet up. Then, as now, Eustace was a senior vice president at Google, so he was well-funded and well-connected enough to make his dream a reality. Debut author Leidich, a career engineer, helped design the spacesuit that Eustace would wear, and somewhere along the line, he became a kind of historian for the StratEx project. He explains the stakes that were involved: “At the time we started this endeavor, four people had ascended to the stratosphere with the intention of free-falling down. Two of them died.” For three years, the team worked to secure funding for, design, and test the balloon that would carry Eustace to the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere and create the suit and parachute that would enable him to safely return. Leidich’s book truly conveys the reality of the engineering process: “Design is meticulous and slow,” the author writes. “It is an intentionally dry and sober process of double, triple, and quadruple checking.” His account is replete with technical detail and doesn’t shy away from the difficulties that he and his cohorts faced. There were moments when tempers flared, office politics came into play, and team members found themselves wondering who was in charge. Leidich even details his own brush with death, when a test of the suit almost resulted in his suffocation. For all its drama and historic value, though, the book doesn’t say much about why the scientists and engineers of StratEx did what they did. Leidich very briefly notes that projects like StratEx are a steppingstone for an eventual journey to Mars, and the book would have been well-served by expanding on that idea. The author does makes a convincing, if somewhat frightening, argument for private space travel, though, when he remarks that only those who are willing to accept the possibility of death will succeed—because riskier projects are more affordable. Of NASA, he says that “a human-carrying spaceship made to their specifications cannot be made with the money and time they have.” This assertion alone could have supported an entire chapter.
An essential guide for any scientist or engineer hoping to attempt a feat of derring-do.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9976919-0-0
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Stratospheric Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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