Coming from a university press (Johns Hopkins), this history of how
Americans first thought about, and then tentatively explored, outer
space straddles the line between pop history and academia. But
McCurdy never gets bogged down in equations nor too-fine levels of
detail; he's writing for the general reader who already has an
interest in the “the final frontier.” That America would lead the
way into space was far from a forgone conclusion. The heavens had
always seemed like a fairy tale. In order to gain popular support
(and thus government funding), Americans had to first view space
flight as a possibility, rather than the stuff of pulp fiction.
Early Twentieth-century proponents of space exploration found
greatest success by promoting it as “the new frontier,” as the
director of the Aeronautics-centric precursor to NASA called it. Man
had recently conquered Africa and the Polar regions, and now it was
time to move upwards. A group of writers, artists, and scientists
launched a well-orchestrated public relations campaign, including,
in 1952, a multi-part series that ran in the popular magazine
Collier's, “Man Will Conquer Space Soon.” Encouraging articles
accompanied by the exquisite artwork of Chesley Bonestell’s rocket
ships and moon bases fired the imaginations of a generation of
future engineers (The book reproduces in black and white several of
his paintings, along with the usual NASA photos and concept art of
space stations.). By the time of the Soviet launch of Sputnik
a few years later, America was ready to make space a priority, if
only out of fear. Once America had broken through with the Apollo
missions, space was no longer a frontier, and it had to earn its
keep in the popular imagination through business. The satellites
that fuel international trade and communications have helped, but
the realities of modern economics have made large space stations, a
distinct possibility as late as the Reagan administration, now a
financial impossibility. NASA also missed out on popularizing space
with women by sticking too closely to its aeronautics-era
prejudices. The loss of public will, so necessary in creating
America's space program, may ultimately doom any future American
exploration of space.
In the pre-high-tech, pre-feminist world of the 1930s – 80s, a steno
pool was a group of “girls” who could be called upon by executives
to take dictation. They were the interchangeable cogs of business.
This pop history of the pink-collar workforce takes readers inside
the world of stenos, typists, and secretaries as seen in the
advertisements, handbooks, and magazines of those times. The “mad
men” (aficionados of 1960s office culture will love this book) who
wrote office equipment ads stuck to stereotypes. For harried male
bosses, a calculator ad featuring a leggy secretary absentmindedly
doing her nails claims that their machine has passed “the dumb
blonde test.” For harried female secretaries, whether advertising
dictating machines or typewriters, the selling point was often that
the machine would help you get out of the office on time to keep a
date. Writers examined the concept of the secretary as “office wife”
in variations ranging from sexy pulp novels like Private
Secretary (“Kim's climb to success cost many broken hearts. One
of them was hers!”) to How to Be a Super-Secretary, which
advised secretaries to give all the credit to their bosses when they
came up with successful ideas because “when he advances you advance
with him.” Although as early as 1953 the Los Angeles Times
railed against drunken parties at the office, in 1964 the doyenne of
single girls in the big city, Helen Gurley Brown, offered her recipe
for a successful office bash: fruit punch mixed with one gallon of
white wine and three or more bottles of vodka.
Although this book doesn't exactly fulfill the promise of its title
(for instance, there's no advice from Xenophon, author of the first
domestic management handbook, Oeconomicus, for the
recently-downsized), Haynes succeeds in pointing out that studying
ancient Greece and Rome helps us “to understand the way we live
today, partly because of the incredible similarities between ancient
and modern worlds, and partly because of the huge differences.” They
are far enough away to be providing a different angle, but not so
alien as to be unintelligible. The book presents a brief, but wide,
survey of the classical world grouped into general topics such as
business, philosophy, and the role of women. Haynes makes that era
more accessible through occasional contemporary parallels. Buffy
the Vampire Slayer contains much of the epic structure and
themes of The Iliad, and if calling The Simpsons “the
most obvious descendant of Aristophanes' comedies—anarchic,
satirical, parodic and political” doesn't make you want to go read
The Knights or The Frogs, her brief descriptions of
these 2,500-year-old comedies will. She also clears up any
misconceptions you might have picked up about Socrates from Monty
Python's “Bruces' Philosophers Song”; the philosopher could indeed
hold his liquor. The ancients had the same problems we did, from war
to ostentatious publicity hounds. Looking to their reactions to
their world is instructive (though we won’t be adopting slavery or
summary executions, of course), and this book makes it interesting
and entertaining.
Kicked out of the bel dames, an elite force of government hit-women,
for ferrying contraband genetic material in her uterus, Nyxnissa so
Dashim emerges from prison and disgrace still on her feet. To
rebuild her livelihood, she assembles and runs a disheveled company
of bounty hunters and manages to keep them fiscally solvent some of
the time. She's halfway content to let the years pass that way.
Then
she gets a note from the Queen -a note encouraging her to pursue an
unusual bounty into the country her people have been at war with for
generations- which she accepts in the hope that success will bring
her back into the bel dames. And that's when everything goes to
shit. God's War is Kameron Hurley's gritty and beguiling debut
novel. It has the kind of plot that will lure in fans of Richard K.
Morgan's Altered Carbon, dangerous and bleak. But where this
book truly stands apart is in the world-building: set so far into
the future that the human colonizers of other worlds think of each
other as aliens (and probably are, given how much they've modified
their genes), on a planet whose hostile suns virtually ensure the
entire population will have frequent brushes with cancer and some
people have developed the 'magical' ability to mentally manipulate
insects at a cellular level, Nyx's story unfolds during the titular
war between a matriarchal and a patriarchal society who no longer
remember why they're at war.
Andrew Jackson faced the gun aimed at his chest. A strange sight
but not altogether unfamiliar, not for a man who’d spent nearly his
entire life fighting wars.
Thrillers with historical backdrop are nothing new. But in the
hands of Steve Berry, The Jefferson Key feels so fresh and
exciting it might as well be the first. That’s because Berry’s
wondrous reinvention of historical fact to serve his fictional needs
is so seasoned his latest reads like one long dizzying chase in
which the present and past mesh seamlessly together.
This time out, Berry grounds the action closer to home, bringing his
essentially expatriate hero Cotton Malone back to American soil just
in time to foil an assassination attempt on President Danny
Daniels. That attempt, Malone will later learn, is actually rooted
in a secret, coded clause in the Constitution somehow connected to
the other four presidential assassinations, Kennedy and Lincoln
included. And from that point the race is on, with Malone and the
trusty Cassiopeia Vic taking on a centuries-old cultish clan that
calls itself “the Commonwealth” and has its own now ignoble
intentions to pursue. Truly scary stuff.
Brad Meltzer recently handled similar material with great aplomb in
The Inner Circle. But Berry goes him one better by adding a
hefty complement of gunfights, fistfights and catfights to the mix,
further solidifying his status as the modern master of the
high-action thriller. Forget Clancy and Cussler. When it comes to
this genre, there is simply no one better.
Katy
Stauber is a first-time novelist with plenty of over-the-top,
post-apocalyptic ideas all whipped through a zany salad shooter of a
plot. Unfortunately, the stilted dialogue and uneven pacing make it
hard for the fun-filled promises to pay off.
The
novel starts out well, as Clio Somata works late in her family’s
gene-splicing lab until interrupted by thieves trying to steal her
techniques. Soon giant mutant rabbits are on the loose, the thieves
are on the run, and the Somata family is getting pressured by the
evil Malsanto company for help with a Federal military contract.
At
the same time, computer-security firm Omerta is building a new
server farm in the same small Texas town where the Somata family
lives. Clio falls for klutzy computer genius Seth just as Seth’s
uncle falls for Clio’s mom. Hi-tech hijinks ensue as the two quirky
companies and families, both with plenty of secrets, try to outsmart
the jackbooted DARPA soldiers that are after them.
There
are a lot of entertaining elements here, but Stauber’s unpolished
prose creates hurdles for the reader. The frequent lack of
contractions in the dialogue reads awkwardly, and the characters’
scolding of the U.S. government’s overzealous police-state is a bit
preachy and obvious. What could be interesting backstory is
sometimes delivered through dry exposition. Although Stauber’s geeky
heart is in the right place—I love how close “Malsanto” is to
“Monsanto”—her debut could have used a little more work in the lab
before it was released into the wild.
The Tragedy of Arthur
tells you on the cover that it’s a novel, so you know that this is
all made up, but there are times when you might forget. Ostensibly
what you are reading is the first publication anywhere of a lost
play by William Shakespeare, the titular Tragedy about the early
British king. But the play is only the last 100 pages of the book.
The first 256 pages are an “Introduction” by Arthur Phillips, the
real best-selling author of several novels. This introduction is a
(we presume fictional) memoir of his life with his father, an art
forger and Shakespeare enthusiast who claims to have found the 1597
script in the library of a manor house in England. Philips, who
thinks little of his convict, con-man father, insists that the play
is a fake, but Random House (the actual publisher of this book)
insists that it's authentic. Letters from the publisher (on
letterhead, but with phone numbers blacked out) even appear in the
book to back up its authenticity. The play itself is fairly
entertaining. It's a variation on the King Arthur myth (no magic,
just the politics), told in believably Shakespearean language. But
half of its entertainment comes from the dueling footnotes between
the debunking Philips and one Professor Roland Verre, the scholar
who has authenticated and annotated the text. Is a shepherdess' cry
of “Turnmelon!” as Verre asserts, “an error of type-setting,” or is
it, as Philips insists, a reference to a song by the alt rock band
Happy Mondays that his dad tried to sneak in? Not overtly comical,
but unrepentantly clever, this book reminds me of the film
Adaptation, where so much is plausible that it's a shame not to
believe it.
The White Devil,
Justin Evans’ daring tale of an American ne’er-do-well teenager
adrift in the famed English boarding school Harrow, reads like A
Separate Peace with murder thrown into the mix. And our hero,
Andrew Taylor, morphs into a kind of Holden Caulfield on steroids as
he battles his own angst-riddled alienation and races to solve the
mystery at the same time.
That mystery involves none other than a giant of a literary figure
in the form of Lord Byron, himself enrolled at the school centuries
before. Think Harry Potter meets Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
In fact, the gothic overtones are so apparent Harrow might just as
easily be called Hogwarts II. But there’s far more than just ghosts
and goblins afoot here. Evans smoothly turns his follow-up to the
very well received A Good and Happy Child into a darkly
beautiful tale that makes Taylor and his would-be mentor Piers
Fawkes into amateur sleuths who must find the killer before other
students fall victim to the paranormal madness.
Never before have I used this page to proclaim the introduction of a
potentially major literary figure onto the scene. But The White
Devil reminds me of John Hart’s brilliant The Last Child,
last year’s Edgar winner for best novel. A similar honor may well
await Justin Evans and, if so, it will be the first of many. A
wonderful book in all respects.
