Energetic history of the first years of the space race, focusing on Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968).
Partly because they were late coming to the atomic bomb, the Soviets were determined not to lose ground in the space race. Consequently, writes popular historian and documentary director Walker, the ministry of defense requisitioned ground “four times the size of Greater London,” at first called Leninsky, where engineers developed the largest rocket in the world. Several rockets had exploded before they got one into space containing two dogs, proof that living things could survive the experience. Soon it was pilot hero Gagarin’s turn. Chosen from a huge group of candidates steadily winnowed down to six—we know this, Walker writes, thanks to a diary a high official in the program surreptitiously kept—Gagarin had strong competition with a fighter pilot named Pavel Popovich, who was ruled out because he was Ukrainian. “Even as the Soviet Union’s propagandists paid lip service to the socialist ideals of ethnic equality,” notes Walker, “Popovich’s origin was a handicap.” Though not the first historian to recount the Soviet Vostok program and its successors, the author does good work in contrasting it in detail with the American astronaut program (John Glenn would orbit the planet less than a year after Gagarin). Of particular interest is Walker’s investigation of the origins of the American determination to be the first to land on the moon, driven by John Kennedy’s bitter recognition of America’s defeat; he asked advisers, “Can we leapfrog them? Is there any place we can catch them? What can we do?” The answer was Apollo, a “distant and uncertain adventure that Kennedy himself had effectively quashed in the latest round of NASA’s budget cuts.” On the human front, Walker’s depiction of Gagarin’s succumbing to the “rock star” syndrome after his orbit, a feat he would never again match, is especially affecting.
A welcome addition to the literature of space exploration, shedding light on the Soviet contribution.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-297815-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The dean of fly-fishing turns in another celebration of the free, unfettered life spent working a quiet stream.
Though Gierach confesses to enjoying a good practical joke, he allows that sometimes—as with the case of an errant rubber snake—they go a bit too far. Moreover, they can lead to a bad-karma jinx. “At a certain age,” he writes sagely, “you’ve made so many dumb mistakes that you’re able to identify the kind of faulty thinking that leads up to them.” Snake stowed away, his fishing game immediately improved, and he notes that “although fishing is no longer really about success, catching fish is still somehow right at the heart of the game.” The author catches fish with the best of them, and in this collection of sketches, he takes us to some fine waters—perhaps the most inviting of them in Alaska, where he found gigantic rainbow trout and the little-known sheefish. “They’re good to eat, but they don’t freeze well for shipping, so few outside Alaska have ever tasted one,” he writes. The more remote the stream, the better, and the more knowledgeable the angler, the better as well. On that note, Gierach opines on the best flies for different occasions, such as the Turle knot that he whipped up on a New Brunswick salmon river only to have his Mi’kmaq guide study it “from every angle,” then retie it “with a Turle knot that, I thought, looked exactly like mine” but that yielded success in the form of two fish. The author also describes bespoke fishing rods and the excellence that underlies their making as well as the need for an angler to know how to read weather and avoid unnecessary danger. On that note, Gierach, ever self-effacing and pleasantly conversational, confesses to good luck, dodging both fires and deadly floods through both caution and dumb luck.
Just the thing for any fan of fly-tying and artful casting.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781501168659
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Categories: NATURE | SPORTS & RECREATION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SURVIVORS & ADVENTURERS
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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