Space-program aficionados will gobble the details like snack chips, and all should be grateful to see Abbey, a deserving...
A highly detailed history of the American space program focusing on the contributions of George Abbey (b. 1932), who held various key administrative positions at NASA.
Cassutt—a TV screenwriter and producer who has written extensively about the space program (fiction and nonfiction), including co-authoring the autobiographies of notables like astronaut Thomas Stafford (We Have Capture, 2002, etc.)—returns with a biography of Abbey that also serves as a history of the enterprise. The combined biographical material would probably fill only a chapter or so—we learn about Abbey’s background, marriage, children, and divorce, the causes of which the author doesn’t discuss—for Cassutt is principally interested in Abbey’s role(s) in NASA, which were considerable. He selected astronauts, organized the various offices around him, and displayed a phenomenal memory. He was a workaholic who earned the respect, if not always the affection, of his co-workers. (Cassutt, however, offers few discouraging words about him.) The text is consistently rich in detail, sometimes overly so. Cascades of names, abbreviations, dates, and events wash over us; as they do, our admiration for Cassutt’s knowledge and research increases as our ability to swallow it declines. He has few unkind words for anyone—though one iconic figure who does endure some disparagement is test pilot Chuck Yeager. In chronological fashion, the author takes us from Sputnik to the present, and he discusses all the grand achievements (moon landing, 1969), failures (Challenger, 1986; Columbia, 2003), and in-between moments. We get to know a bit about the astronauts’ personalities and politics, and we see Abbey’s evolving efforts to be more inclusive in the selection of personnel. As the director of the Johnson Space Center in the 1990s, “he was in charge of twenty thousand civil servants and contractors not only Houston, but in locations such as White Sands.”
Space-program aficionados will gobble the details like snack chips, and all should be grateful to see Abbey, a deserving man, step out from the shadows.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61373-700-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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