Certainly of interest to aerospace fans, Cold War buffs, and conspiracy theorists, but possibly also right for the...
The daughter of an aerospace engineer tells occasionally scandalous personal stories about the geniuses who engineered the space race, while coming to terms with her father’s detachment from her life.
Lord’s jauntily feminist perspective, also evident in Forever Barbie (1995), sets this effort apart from the Right Stuff pack of more mainstream books about the rocket men. “The buzz-cut cowboys of Mission Control, homogeneous as a Rockette kick-line, were a cold-war fiction,” she writes in the introduction. She may include two chapters on “gender parity,” but Lord’s estrogen-friendly perspective doesn’t define the book so much as distinguish it. Though she aims to drive the narrative with her quest to tease out the factors behind her father’s de facto absence from his home life, that remains a side-plot. Her pop-psychology, gender-role analysis has the most impact in her indictment of the system and the environment that drove these men to behave as they did. Lord draws the expected links from Nazism to the postwar space race and supplies “recently declassified” information to add new fuel to the fire. In her indictment of the red-scare politics that publicly rehabilitated war criminals while ruining the careers of innocent engineers, she implicates the usual suspects (Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ) and digs up a few new bogeymen (Ike, Phyllis Schlafly, Walt Disney) with allegations and conclusions that are well sourced, if not exhaustively fleshed-out. She aims to entertain as much as to educate, but Lord fails to weave a narrative thread compelling enough to escape the gravity of the cold technical details. The text sometimes reads like a glib hybrid of science history and tabloid gossip. In the end, however, Lord’s snappy prose and studied perspective save the project, especially when she links particular scientists to autism, the European art scene, or occult sex rituals.
Certainly of interest to aerospace fans, Cold War buffs, and conspiracy theorists, but possibly also right for the iconoclastic bookish young woman.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8027-1427-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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