This is a book about the history of manned space flight told through the lives and stories, the accounts and experiences of the people who’ve actually made the journey to space, all the astronauts and cosmonauts starting with Yuri Gagarin.
It all began in the late 1950's with the Soviet launch of a satellite called Sputnik - a move that the Americans had not anticipated at all. Seeing as this was a time when the cold war was at its height, they scrambled for a response. This led to the founding of NASA, and a race was underway to send the first man into space. The Americans launched the Mercury program, and the Soviets launched the Vostok program. The Americans chose seven astronauts from a pool of military test pilots, the Soviets chose twenty one (the director of their space program wanted to have three times as many candidates as the Americans did). They identified the six best from the original twenty-one and decided that one of them would be the first Russian, and hopefully the first man to go into space.
Extensive preparations were underway on both sides of the iron curtain. NASA’s final choice was Alan Shepherd, while the Soviet Space Agency went with Yuri Gagarin. They had narrowed it down to two men, Gagarin and Gherman Titov. Both were very able and equally skilled - ideal candidates for the high-risk endeavour of being the first human being to go into space. What was the deciding factor? Gagarin was more outgoing and more personable. He had a ready smile that would look very good in all the photographs and media coverage that would follow his successful return. It came down to personality, and perhaps a bit of luck.
The United States, which lost out on the opportunity to put the first man in space by a mere three weeks, shifted its target to putting the first man on the moon. Why did they choose Neil Armstrong? It came down to his temperament. Armstrong had an accident while training with the LLTV which was an earth-bound mock-up of the lunar lander. This was an unreliable vehicle that some of the astronauts had dubbed the flying bedstead and the belching spider. Things went wrong, and he had to bail. He got out of the vehicle two-and-a-half seconds before it exploded. He was a bit winded when he landed, but he was miraculously unhurt. Less than an hour later, he was in his office doing paperwork and responding to anxious queries with a shrug, as if to say, stuff happens. His unflappability endeared him to the NASA top brass. His all-American good looks didn't hurt either.
This book is full of little details like this. In the first chapter, for instance, Peake writes about the very first astronaut recruitment program undertaken by both the US and the Soviet Union, even including how the words astronaut and cosmonaut were chosen to describe who these men were going to be, and what they were going to do. We assume that the words always existed, but they didn't. They were names adopted (from Greek root words) to describe a new thing. NASA debated over which of these words to use and went with astronaut, meaning sailor of the stars. The Soviets, chose to go with cosmonaut, which means sailor of the cosmos.
While covering the history of manned space flight, Peake also looks forward to the future, to the Artemis missions which will be the first manned missions to the moon in over fifty years. The narrative is not linear or chronological and that, somehow, makes it better. The book is organised in the order in which an astronaut experiences a mission, from the initial selection process to the training, to how crews are chosen for a mission, to the launch, take off, the mission itself, and then the return to earth with all the perils, accidents, disasters, triumphs and remarkable achievements that have characterised each of these stages through the history of space flight.
Tim Peake is an astronaut himself, and he's been through the entire process, so he brings a personal perspective to a lot of what he writes about. His writing has an immediacy that brings all these people and all of this history alive. While the book is full of details, they are skilfully worked into the narrative which does not flag at any point. He covers so much ground and does it with an ease that’s commendable. I’m a space history nerd and I’ve read and loved several books on the subject, and I can tell you that this book is right up there with the best of them.
This is a work of auto-fiction by cartoonist Luke Healy, covering two decades of his life, beginning when he turns 30. As the novel begins, Luke is wracked with self-doubt. His successful career in comics seems to have suddenly evaporated (the pandemic, supply chain issues, etc). He is then wracked with guilt about being self-absorbed and narcissistic when the climate crisis is getting worse by the day and the planet is dying.
The novel, set sometime in the future, is replete with deadpan humour even as it deals with serious issues including grief and identity and the worsening climate crisis. Luke has the habit of asking random strangers if they ever feel like their death is imminent. He is constantly reading and listening to self-help psychobabble which even the mice in his apartment (watching him with sympathy) know is not going to help him. He is close with his mom, and ‘Mam’ is a pragmatic and supportive presence in his life - when he takes on a questionable writing gig from which they escape at the last minute (choosing to take on a life-threatening flood conditions to get away), and when twenty years later, one of his comics is being made into a movie in a now nearly submerged L.A.
A tale of tragicomic self-discovery. Loved it.
A page from Self-Esteem and the End of the World. Illustration: Luke Healy
Private Equity by Carrie Sun
I seem to be drawn to books set in the world of high finance/venture capital/private equity – not technical books but memoirs, or other narrative non-fiction that provides a behind the scenes look at how this world works. A few of my favourite reads in the past have included Bad Blood by Wall Street journalist John Carreyrou (a brilliant book about Elizabeth Holmes and the disaster that was Theranos), Black Edge by former hedge fund analyst Sheelah Kolhatkar (or any of her pieces in the New Yorker). And then there is Michael Lewis (The Big Short, Flash Boys, Liar’s Poker.)
This is what led me to pick up Private Equity. When former Fidelity analyst and MFA graduate Carrie Sun gets the opportunity to work at Carbon (pseudonym), one of the most prestigious and successful hedge funds in the world, she is taking a few steps down in terms of her professional qualifications. The role is that of sole assistant to the founder of the firm, Boone Prescott (pseudonym). As she navigates several interviews for this role, she is grilled repeatedly about why she would want the job when she could potentially be a portfolio manager herself or could be doing something more elevated than being an assistant. Carrie maintains that this is a conscious choice on her part, that she is the “grease”, and that she would never want to be the “wheels”.
She lands the job, perhaps hoping that helping to organize and “grease” someone else’s life and getting paid well for this, would mean that she would have the time to explore her real interest (writing). She is proven laughably wrong from Day 1. Being Boone’s assistant is an all-consuming life. From planning the minutiae of his days, plating his meals, planning his luxury vacations, to doing his research, writing out his speeches, analysing market reports – she does all this and much more, so that Boone can function at peak efficiency.
An incident very early on is an ominous indication of what is coming – he sends her, and another colleague, an email one night, it does not seem urgent (it’s a picture of his kids at the company’s family day event). Carrie looks at it, think she will tell him the next day that his kids are adorable. When she sees him the next morning Boone is unhappy – he makes it plain that he needs to know that she has read every email he sends her. She needs to respond right away.
While she initially feels a sense of thrill and asserts that she loves her job, we can see quite clearly that the job is not loving her back. The stress starts to pile up, leading to injury, illness, and disordered eating. Boone is a generous boss, rewarding her with expensive gifts for a job well done, but never considers lowering her workload or providing practical support or fixing the culture of the organization. Consistent world class performance remains the expectation. His solution, when she does finally bring up her impossible workload and the toll it is taking on her, is to ask her to take an afternoon off, to get a spa treatment that he gifts her with.
Carrie also weaves in the story of her difficult childhood as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, of a trauma suffered while in college, of the engagement she chooses to end (with a controlling fiancée who does not want her to work). These do help paint a slightly clearer picture of Carrie, because without this, it was not easy for me to understand some of her choices. Her naiveté also felt slightly incredulous, she believes (at least at the start of her stint) that working for Carbon could be a way of serving humanity. She does realize by the end that “there is only money” and that “everything else is a side effect”.
Engaging, if slightly patchy, memoir. A critique of the toxic work culture that prevails in several organizations today, asking the question - how much of ourselves are we willing to give up, for a job. And a peek into the secretive and privileged world of those who make up 1% of the 1%.