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
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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