A capable chronicle of America’s post-Apollo space program.
An enthusiastic account of the NASA astronaut class of 1978.
Writer and film producer Bagby reminds readers that every astronaut chosen in the years after 1959 to fly the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs was a White male, and there was only scattered grumbling about the absence of women and minorities. Matters had changed by 1977, when NASA received more than 8,000 applications and chose 35 “lucky souls” to fly the new space shuttle. “Astronaut Class 8 looked like none before it,” writes the author. “Gone were the rows of buzz cuts and dark suits that typified every prior astronaut group.” Most were military officers, but there were also doctors, engineers, chemists, physicists, and astronomers. More significantly, the group had three Black members, one Asian, and six women. These 10 astronauts feature prominently throughout the narrative, which Bagby peppers with invented dialogue and insight into their thoughts, a common approach in the genre. Regardless of style, the author has done her homework, writing a gripping account of America’s mature manned space program, dominated by the shuttle that flew 135 missions from 1981 to 2011, 133 successfully. Its predecessor (the Saturn V rocket and its capsules) completed every mission, but they were built in an era when money was no object. Developed when America no longer feared Soviet technology and was plagued by budget cuts, the shuttle was a hypercomplicated system full of design compromises. Without ignoring the cutthroat politics that regularly trumped the science, Bagby describes a score of shuttle missions in detail, with emphasis on the triumphs (launching and then repairing the Hubble telescope, sending off planetary probes, building the space station) as well as an unnerving number of technological near misses. The two disasters feature prominently, and nearly 100 pages devoted to Challenger in 1986 deliver perhaps more information than general readers want to know—though space buffs will enjoy it.
A capable chronicle of America’s post-Apollo space program.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063141971
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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