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RISE OF THE ROCKET GIRLS

Name: RISE OF THE ROCKET GIRLS
Author: Nathalia Holt
ISBN: 978-0-316-33892-9

THE WOMEN WHO PROPELLED US, FROM MISSILES TO THE MOON TO MARS

by Nathalia Holt ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 2016

A fresh contribution to women’s history.

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The history of women as vital contributors to advancements in early space exploration.

In this engaging history and group biography, science journalist Holt (Cured: How the Berlin Patients Defeated HIV and Forever Changed Medical Science, 2014) reveals the significance of the young women mathematicians who staffed the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Beginning in the 1940s, women who had been the only females in college mathematics and chemistry classes found themselves part of an eager team of scientists and engineers whose first project was to produce “a new weapon, a long-range jet-propelled missile that could carry a thousand-pound warhead for a hundred miles at a speed capable of eluding an enemy fighter aircraft.” Drawing on interviews with surviving team members, Holt traces the frustrations, failures, and successes of rocket development before computers came on the scene. Working with pencils, graph paper, and notebooks, it took one woman a day to calculate a single rocket’s trajectory, plotting the path in a hand-drawn picture. Sometimes they used a Friden calculator, a heavy, unwieldy mechanism that vibrated noisily. When the IBM 704 computer—weighing more than 30,000 pounds and costing $2 million—arrived in the late 1950s, the JPL staff was suspicious. “The engineers and computers preferred to do their calculations by hand,” writes the author, “not trusting the massive machines that had too many glitches to be trustworthy.” After Russia sent Sputnik into space, the JPL pressed for funds to develop a satellite, frustrated that Eisenhower’s administration “worried that the space race might turn into the space war.” They were jubilant when they were finally able to work on unmanned missions. Besides chronicling the development of America’s space program, Holt recounts the women’s private lives—marriages, babies, and the challenge of combining motherhood and work—gleaned from her interviewees’ vivid memories.

A fresh contribution to women’s history.

Pub Date: April 12, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-316-33892-9

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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WISE GALS
by Nathalia Holt

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THE QUEENS OF ANIMATION
by Nathalia Holt

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CURED
by Nathalia Holt

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)