Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science - Softcover

Lord, M. G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802777392 ISBN 13: 9780802777393

Publisher: Walker Books, 2006

Synopsis

Drawing on her own memories of growing up as the daughter of a rocket engineer in the late 1960s, the author of Forever Barbie describes her fascination with her father's work at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory while recalling her pain at her father's absence and her fascination with science and space exploration. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

M. G. Lord is an author and critic. Since 1995 she has been a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and Times's Arts & Leisure section. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including ARTNews, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. Currently, she is completing a family memoir about aerospace culture during the Cold War, which will be published in 2004 by Walker & Company. She lives in Los Angeles.

From Publishers Weekly

The success of the 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission—and the fact that its dynamic director, Donna Shirley, was a woman—reminded many of how far both space exploration and NASA's male-dominated culture had come. Lord (Forever Barbie) ought to know. Her dad, a rocket scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California during the '60s, had a personality as distant as the stars, and his anachronistic views about women left Lord "driven by terror" to flee to college. Upon her return to JPL 30 years later to learn what made engineers, and her dad, tick, Lord confirmed that he'd simply "embraced the values of his profession: work over family, masculine over feminine, repression over emotion." WWII and McCarthyism had helped create JPL's cowboy culture; for years, the few women who worked there were encouraged to compete for the title of Miss Guided Missile, a beauty and popularity contest. Homosexuals, meanwhile, were barred from employment, even while German engineers who'd committed Nazi war crimes were welcomed with open arms. It wasn't until Donna Shirley arrived in the 1970s that the center's top-down, male-oriented management approach gradually shifted to a "partnership" model. This is an often fascinating work, and cultural critic Lord's sharp turns from family affairs to JPL history result in wonderful discoveries for readers.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Walker Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802777392
• ISBN 13: 9780802777393
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272