Space-program aficionados will gobble the details like snack chips, and all should be grateful to see Abbey, a deserving...
A highly detailed history of the American space program focusing on the contributions of George Abbey (b. 1932), who held various key administrative positions at NASA.
Cassutt—a TV screenwriter and producer who has written extensively about the space program (fiction and nonfiction), including co-authoring the autobiographies of notables like astronaut Thomas Stafford (We Have Capture, 2002, etc.)—returns with a biography of Abbey that also serves as a history of the enterprise. The combined biographical material would probably fill only a chapter or so—we learn about Abbey’s background, marriage, children, and divorce, the causes of which the author doesn’t discuss—for Cassutt is principally interested in Abbey’s role(s) in NASA, which were considerable. He selected astronauts, organized the various offices around him, and displayed a phenomenal memory. He was a workaholic who earned the respect, if not always the affection, of his co-workers. (Cassutt, however, offers few discouraging words about him.) The text is consistently rich in detail, sometimes overly so. Cascades of names, abbreviations, dates, and events wash over us; as they do, our admiration for Cassutt’s knowledge and research increases as our ability to swallow it declines. He has few unkind words for anyone—though one iconic figure who does endure some disparagement is test pilot Chuck Yeager. In chronological fashion, the author takes us from Sputnik to the present, and he discusses all the grand achievements (moon landing, 1969), failures (Challenger, 1986; Columbia, 2003), and in-between moments. We get to know a bit about the astronauts’ personalities and politics, and we see Abbey’s evolving efforts to be more inclusive in the selection of personnel. As the director of the Johnson Space Center in the 1990s, “he was in charge of twenty thousand civil servants and contractors not only Houston, but in locations such as White Sands.”
Space-program aficionados will gobble the details like snack chips, and all should be grateful to see Abbey, a deserving man, step out from the shadows.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61373-700-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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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