Certainly of interest to aerospace fans, Cold War buffs, and conspiracy theorists, but possibly also right for the...
The daughter of an aerospace engineer tells occasionally scandalous personal stories about the geniuses who engineered the space race, while coming to terms with her father’s detachment from her life.
Lord’s jauntily feminist perspective, also evident in Forever Barbie (1995), sets this effort apart from the Right Stuff pack of more mainstream books about the rocket men. “The buzz-cut cowboys of Mission Control, homogeneous as a Rockette kick-line, were a cold-war fiction,” she writes in the introduction. She may include two chapters on “gender parity,” but Lord’s estrogen-friendly perspective doesn’t define the book so much as distinguish it. Though she aims to drive the narrative with her quest to tease out the factors behind her father’s de facto absence from his home life, that remains a side-plot. Her pop-psychology, gender-role analysis has the most impact in her indictment of the system and the environment that drove these men to behave as they did. Lord draws the expected links from Nazism to the postwar space race and supplies “recently declassified” information to add new fuel to the fire. In her indictment of the red-scare politics that publicly rehabilitated war criminals while ruining the careers of innocent engineers, she implicates the usual suspects (Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ) and digs up a few new bogeymen (Ike, Phyllis Schlafly, Walt Disney) with allegations and conclusions that are well sourced, if not exhaustively fleshed-out. She aims to entertain as much as to educate, but Lord fails to weave a narrative thread compelling enough to escape the gravity of the cold technical details. The text sometimes reads like a glib hybrid of science history and tabloid gossip. In the end, however, Lord’s snappy prose and studied perspective save the project, especially when she links particular scientists to autism, the European art scene, or occult sex rituals.
Certainly of interest to aerospace fans, Cold War buffs, and conspiracy theorists, but possibly also right for the iconoclastic bookish young woman.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8027-1427-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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