Astro Turf The Private Life of Rocket Science

by Lord, M. G.

• ISBN13: 9780802777393
• ISBN10: 0802777392
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-02-07
• Publisher: Walker Books

Summary

M. G. Lordis an author and critic. Since 1995 she has been a regular contributor toThe New York Times Book ReviewandThe New York TimesArts & Leisure section. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, includingARTNews,Vogue,The Wall Street Journal,The Los Angeles Times Book Review, andThe New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles. During the late 1960s, while M. G. Lord was becoming a teenager in Southern California and her mother was dying of cancer, Lord's fatheran archetypal, remote rocket engineerdisappeared into his work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, building the space probes of the Mariner Mars 69 mission. Thirty years later, Lord found herself reporting on the JPL, triggering childhood memories and a desire to revisit her past as a way of understanding the ethos of rocket science.Astro Turfis the result of her journey of discovery. Remembering her pain at her father's absence, yet intrigued by what he did, Lord captures him on the page as she recalls her own youthful, eccentric fascination with science and space exploration. Into her family's saga she weaves the story of the legendary JPLexamining the complexities of its cultural history, from its start in 1936 to the triumphant Mars landings in 2004. She illuminates its founder, Frank Malina, whose brilliance in rocketry was shadowed by a flirtation with communism, driving him from the country even as we welcomed Wernher von Braun and his Nazi colleagues. Lord's own love of science fiction becomes a lens through which she views a profound cultural shift in the male-dominated world of space. And in pursuing the cause of her father's absence she stumbles on a hidden guilt, understanding "the anguish his proud silence caused both him and me, and how rooted that silence was in the culture of engineering." As in her bookForever Barbie, which demystified an icon of feminine culture, Lord brings her insight to bear on a bastion of American masculinity, opening our eyes in unexpected and memorable ways. "Astro Turfworks well as a brief, clear history of a field and the lab that embodied it. It works even better as a piece of cultural criticism. [It] works best of all, though, as a moving memoir of the difficult love between a daughter and father."The New York Times Book Review "Astro Turfworks well as a brief, clear history of a field and the lab that embodied it. It works even better as a piece of cultural criticism. [It] works best of all, though, as a moving memoir of the difficult love between a daughter and father."The New York Times Book Review "I had absolutely no idea of her arduous childhood, [Lord's] adult life, her interest in space, her ultimate affection forand forgiveness ofher father, no knowledge of her prose style, which combines the madcap with the abstruse. I was blown away by this book. Lord reminds us once again that good and evil really are inextricably combined, that the legacy of these sometimes bumbling founders includes the presence of a JPL float in this year's Rose Parade and the ongoing discoveries of those aptly named JPL robots poking right now across the surface of Mars: Spirit and Opportunity."Carolyn See,The WashingtonPost "Engaging . . . part memoir, part cultural history, part paean to unmanned space exploration."Fritz Lanham,Houston Chronicle "Astro Turfis worlds apart from Lord's splendid debut book,Forever Barbie, but the writing is as powerful and t