From the Fields to the Stars (Hardcover)

Hardcover. This memoir brings together and substantially expands the stories first told in my three earlier memoirs -Under the Midnight Sky, I followed a Different Star, and Tree Time: Living on Nature's Clock-reimagining them as one unified story of a life shaped by curiosity, faith, service, and the people who helped along the way. Readers who encountered those books will find familiar ground here, expanded and reframed with substantial new material and presented through two complementary voices for the first time.A high school teacher once told Geoffrey Yoder that because he grew up on a small Pennsylvania dairy farm, he would not become more than a farmer.Life had other plans.From rural Pennsylvania to NASA Headquarters, From the Fields to the Stars is a deeply personal memoir about the mentors, family, friendships, hardships, and quiet acts of kindness that transformed one life-and inspired a lifetime of serving others.From Farm Fields.Imagine growing up on a small dairy farm where mornings began before sunrise and evenings ended beneath some of the darkest skies in America.Those fields became the classroom where perseverance, responsibility, and faith first took root.To the StarsThose same lessons eventually carried Geoffrey Yoder into a thirty-two-year engineering career in private industry and at NASA, helping lead some of America's most ambitious space science programs and ultimately serving in NASA leadership. Yet the greatest discoveries were not found among the stars. They were found in the people encountered along the way.Two Voices. One Life.From the Fields to the Stars is told in two registers.The Memoir Voice moves forward through time, inside each event as it unfolds - the child at the fence line, the community college classroom, the first day at Johnson Space Center, the Columbia Space Shuttle, the James Webb Space Telescope program directorship.The Tree Time Voice speaks from retirement, looking back at what the rings mean - what was given, what it cost, what was carried forward, and what it means to become someone else's aquifer.The governing image is the tree. You cannot count the rings from the outside. You have to go in to find them.This book goes in. A Memoir of Faith, Resilience, and the InfiniteThe people who shape our lives rarely realize how far their kindness will carry us. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…