A valuable, perceptive eyewitness account of one giant leap for mankind.
Stachurski, assigned by a superior in the U.S. Air Force to work at NASA during the 1969 moon landing, tells his version of man’s greatest adventure.
In July 1969, Stachurski was one of the ground technicians at Mission Control in Houston during the near-mythic Apollo 11 lunar landing. His aim here is not to put readers in the moon boots of Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin (who remain distant figures in this telling) but rather into the seats of the rows upon rows of generally unsung, console-bound tech specialists at Mission Control. They were incredibly near the action yet so far, connected to the spaceships by a tenuous web of low-wattage radio telemetry being intercepted and relayed at stations around the Earth, as they digested and second-guessed data about the Apollo spacecraft and its trajectory. Stachurski volunteers a few bio tidbits about himself, an academic prodigy born to a working-class household. He studied history but wound up in the Air Force, minding nuclear missile silos in the American heartland, until he was recruited for the NASA effort, according to him, because someone thought it would be interesting to see a “liberal arts puke” in the mix with rocket scientists. As lead network controller, Stachurski describes himself as a math-illiterate, nontechnical type, terrified that something would go wrong with Apollo 11 on his watch. But, apart from a prolonged communications lapse with a tracking station on the Canary Islands, things proceeded more or less without a snag. There’s a revelation that a mismatched mélange of corporate contractors meant some hardware couldn’t interface properly, and a false alarm that a lunar module fuel tank had gone faulty (which would have potentially stranded Armstrong and Aldrin) constitutes the only real sense of jeopardy. For the most part, this story has been told many times before, but Stachurski’s take is offbeat if a bit dry; despite his efforts to convey NASA techno-jargon for the layman (who might want to read the glossary and extensive appendices first), there’s little drama in dialogue such as “COMM CONTROL, NETWORK. Can you confirm your circuit restoral priorities for me?” Fortunately, the author—perhaps thanks to his inner “liberal arts puke”—felt the need to document the events in Houston, and readers will be glad he took such extensive notes. Though the author resists editorializing about politics and subsequent directions taken by NASA, his Apollo refrain—“Not bad for government work”—hints at the enormous amount of teamwork involved.
A valuable, perceptive eyewitness account of one giant leap for mankind.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482527650
Page Count: 356
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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