Chet raymo biography of barack
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WALKING ZERO
Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first sju astronauts.
But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the sju, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the fingerprydnad of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way,
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The Power of Paying Attention
For nearly 50 years, Chet Raymo walked the same one-mile path between his home in suburban Boston and his office at Stonehill College, where he taught as a professor of physics and astronomy. The path crosses through a prototypically New England landscape of woods and meadows, across a rushing brook and past historic homes built by immigrants who labored in the local shovel works.
Raymo ’58, ’64Ph.D. catalogued nearly every inch of that walk for The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe, a book he wrote in that brims with observations large and small — about the lives of the immigrants who built those houses, the granite rocks left behind by glacial drift, the migration patterns of monarch butterflies. Reading it is like walking with a witty companion equipped with a microscope mounted on a telescope, who at any moment might zoom in on the geology of pebbles, or zoom out to contemplate the courses of stars.
“I was trying to show that if you ta
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THE DORK OF CORK
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's , after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Mari