For the true space enthusiast only.
Shuttle veteran Jones reminisces about rocketing into space.
Jones tells his story with no unnecessary drama—no filigree or chest-pounding here. Unfortunately, he doesn’t provide much excitement either. The author seems like the prototypical guy whom NASA would hire. An air force pilot and CIA scientist—he can’t go into much detail on the latter, more’s the shame—he was picked to join the 1989 crop of “Ascans” (“astronaut candidates”), nicknamed the “Hairballs,” for foggy reasons. Not until 1994 was Jones finally allowed to head into space aboard the shuttle Endeavour. He renders that trip rousingly, but it’s the first of four, and Jones makes little attempt to add a human touch that might have differentiated them. Plenty of time is spent on the mechanics of space flight, including descriptions of pulling six Gs on liftoff and the painful wear and tear that the “launch and entry suit” exacts on anyone stuffed inside it. In the process, Jones reminds readers of the unbelievable patience that shuttle astronauts most possess; he characterizes one especially difficult space station mission as, “like backing a Lamborghini out of the garage with your eyes closed, knowing that if you dented a fender, the nearest body shop was 240 miles away—straight down.” The unfailingly decent author has little bad to say about anybody and takes his duties as an astronaut extremely seriously. Lacking the touch of the true writer, this sober approach results in something less like a book than a setup for a NASA fundraiser.
For the true space enthusiast only.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-085152-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Smithsonian/Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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
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