A story of dreams and delusions, with more than a soupçon of the pathetic tossed in.
Weil captures the benign madness as Gary Hudson tries to build the first civilian spacecraft.
The “entirely self-taught” Hudson and his cohorts have thus far not had much success; their ships have routinely imploded, exploded, and disintegrated rather than touched the firmament. Weil tries to convey the positive aspects of Hudson's mindset (one of his workers comments, “Some people say that Gary is ba-fucking-nanas, and I would say those people have no vision. I would not go to tea with them. Their souls are dust”), but also shows a penchant, even a desire, for failure shared by many of those closest to him. “We like to set the bar a few inches higher than we can possibly attain,” admits the test site manager. Chronicling Hudson’s three-year quest to build the Roton, a fully reusable spacecraft, Weil's tone is vigilant and lonely. It’s evident from the get-go that the project will not succeed, and the author depicts Hudson as an eternal boy: adolescently charming, messianic, asocial, restless, “refus[ing] to adapt to the mainstream world because that world obscures his hidden genius.” For all the millions he garners from venture capitalists, the world he inhabits is pretty tatty, pasty and remote and disturbingly blinkered. Of course, debut author Weil appreciates, all visionaries are cranks until they bring home the goods, and cutting hard across the grain is the whole point. But Hudson's vehicle is deeply flawed. An aerospace engineer points out that it has the wrong fuel, the wrong number of gears and stages, the wrong hardware, and the wrong business model; tests bear this out, and his funding dries up. It is comforting to know such odd fellows are out there pursuing their outlandish schemes, which might someday be beneficial and in any case are presumably harmless. It is also nice to know they are far away in the desert.
A story of dreams and delusions, with more than a soupçon of the pathetic tossed in.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-553-10886-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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