An intimately celebratory biography.
An award-winning journalist’s revealing biography of Sally Ride (1951-2012), the first American woman in space.
Former ABC News correspondent Sherr (Swim: Why We Love the Water, 2012, etc.) first met Ride, a young Stanford-trained physicist, in 1981. Three years earlier, NASA had chosen Ride to join a group of five other women and 29 men to participate in the new space shuttle program. The group represented the very best minds America had to offer. But for the women, who were the first in NASA history to be selected for space flight, the challenge was even greater. They not only represented themselves as individuals, but their entire gender. As the first woman to actually go on a mission, Ride came under especially intense scrutiny from the media. Her ability to lead but also “take orders like a trooper,” along with her wit and charm, endeared her to America and the world. During the nine years she was associated with the space program, Ride’s exemplary conduct “transformed female astronauts from a punch line into a matter of national pride.” She returned to academia afterward and became a professor. Eager to use her notoriety to help young people, and especially girls, take an interest in math and science, she co-founded Sally Ride Science in 2001. However, the former astronaut was never entirely comfortable with her celebrity status and kept parts of her life hidden, including the fact that she was a lesbian. Though married during her years at NASA, Ride’s true sexual orientation did not become public until her death, when her obituary mentioned that she had been survived by a female partner of nearly three decades. Sherr’s book is important not simply because it memorializes an American icon. It pointedly reminds readers of the crippling burden of “shame and fear” that even—and perhaps especially—the most golden heroes must bear in societies that cannot tolerate difference.
An intimately celebratory biography.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2576-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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