Puttering in the Study

Dinosaurs: A Journey to the Lost Kingdom - Christine Argot & Luc Vives

I picked this book up last spring or the spring before at the Smithsonian in Washington when we were going through with Collin and Parker. It is a beautiful little slipcased book, and had the best illustrations I've ever seen of dinosaurs.

Only as I started working my way through it did I realize that it was about the dinosaur collections of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and was created to coincide with a traveling exhibition of that museum's T. Rex "Trix" and the international release of Jurassic World. But it provided an extensive background on the history of the collections and of the history of paleontology as applied to dinosaurs, including a substantial collection of paintings and engravings from the earliest days of dinosaur illustration.

Overall, a very entertaining book.

Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journey - Michael Collins

Collins’ book about his experiences as an astronaut in the space program is hands down not just my favorite astronaut memoir, but probably my favorite memoir of all.  He is good at relaying the relevant information about his experiences in a way that makes you understand what he’s talking about.  And funny - he is so funny.  No matter how serious the issue, he sees the humorous side.

If you’re going to read one book about an individual in the race to the moon - this is the one.

One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon - Charles Fishman

This is my most recent Apollo program read, and I enjoyed it very much.  The author's premise is that the digital world owes its origins to the Apollo program, and makes a strong case that it was Apollo's use of then-uncommon computer "chips" that both drove their price down and their reliability up so that they became a mainstay of modern products.

He also tells the fascinating story - based on later declassified recordings of a meeting JFK had on space policy with his advisers and a private meeting NASA chief James Webb in late 1963 that make clear that Kennedy's commitment to the moon race was flagging by the time of his trip to Texas as it became clearer that the program would not make it to the moon during his presidency, the cost of the program would require continuing support from Congress, and the original reason - the show American superiority over the Soviets in space technology - was being satisfied by the program's advances since 1961. 

So while it was Kennedy that set the goal, it was only his replacement by a true believer in the space race - Lyndon Johnson - that ensured the level of financial commitment needed to get to the moon before the end of the decade.

Fishman also addresses the constant "what we could have done with that money" argument, making clear that spending for Apollo wouldn't have simply been redirected to antipoverty or other programs, and can't be blamed for the levels of spending those programs enjoyed.  Apollo ended up costing almost exactly what its initial estimates predicted - about $20 billion, with spending peaking in the mid-60's at around $3 billion a year.  I can't recall the precise figures, but at exactly the same time the U.S. spent about five times as much - per year and overall - on the Vietnam War, which mnakes clear that the money was there - it was just spent on something else.

The book also tells the fascinating story of the development of the Apollo computer hardware and software, as well as the guidance systems.  Interestingly, the book told very few stories that I had heard before - even in part.  It was new stories and new insights into a story that is now half a century old.

NASA Saturn V 1967-1973 (Apollo 4 to Apollo 17 & Skylab) NASA Apollo 11 (Owners' Workshop Manual)

I am such an Apollo fanboy that I have both the Saturn V and the Apollo 11 Owners' Workshop Manual books.ormally N I wouldn't post on reference materials like this (I also have the ones on the Titanic and the starship Enterprise because of course), but the Saturn V book in particular just floored me when I read it cover to cover the other day.  Candidly I just got these for the pictures while I'm working on my Saturn V model, but I'm at the stage (no pun intended) that I needed to know how the rocket's stages interfaced with the support structures to model the access ports and openings, and decided to start reading the text as well.

The stories the Saturn V book in particularly tells are simply fascinating.  The engineering that went into every element of the spacecraft and booster is just amazing.  The books explains what the individual parts and systems did, how they were development, and how they had to adapt to the specific challenges they faced.  Just great, great stuff.

Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant Paperback – Daniel Tammet

A friend that I'd had a discussion about Aspergers Syndrome with recently sent me this book, and I finished it last night as well.  It's a fascinating story of Daniel Tammet about what life is like as an autistic savant.  He explains clearly what challenges he faced growing up - and still faces - and how he overcomes them.  What's fascinating about the book is how well he can explain what he sees, most notably his synesthesia.  What this refers to is that he sees numbers and shapes, and visualizes lengthy sequences the same way.  He can even draw and sculpt what the shapes look like. For example, here's how he visualizes the first 20 digits of pi.

He tells a fascinating story about when he was presented with a section of hundreds of numbers from the 22,000 he memorized of pi (that's 3.14 for the rest of us) as part of the filming of a program for TV about him, Brainman.  The producers had randomly replaced the number "6" with the number "9" and Tammet realized right away something was wrong - because the shape of what he was seeing didn't like right.  He described the shape as looking like a familiar home that had been vandalized.

Great book if you're interested in the subject.  

First Man - James R. Hansen

After watching the movie and reading the annotated screenplay I decided to read the original book.  While I'm very glad Armstrong decided to allow an author to tell his story, I didn't find the book terribly good.  It was never quite a hagiography, but you were always aware that it was an authorized biography, and while I don't think Hansen whitewashed anything - I think Armstrong was as nice and as calm as he appears and doesn't appear to have had an ax to grind - the reticence of the main character doesn't help make the story interesting.

Which makes no difference to the story - what Armstrong did is all the story any author ever needs, and Hansen does do history a great service by asking Armstrong many of the questions historians wanted to know.  Did it happen this way or that way?  What were you thinking?  So while the repeated insertion of "Armstrong says that ..." was slightly jarring, it made it a more interesting read, because this is the one place where Armstrong's reticence wasn't an obstacle - if the question was asked, he answered it.  But deathless prose it isn't.

The book did make me sad I never got to meet Neil Armstrong - I would really have liked to.  My absolute favorite part of the book was was when he was an older man and was having dinner at a friend's house and after dinner, the host's small daughter (or granddaughter) took her family's visitor around by the hand to show him her stuff.  She was narrating all her toys and books and pointed out that she had a book about the moon landings, and chattered on that the first man to walk on the moon was Neil Armstrong, and then brightened and said "and your name is Neil Armstrong too!"  And kept talking, it never having occurred to her that the old gentleman was the same man.  I absolutely love that story just for the smile it must have brought to his face.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs A New History of a Lost World - Steve Brusatte

This book got good reviews, and I thought (incorrectly) that Parker might read it, so I picked it up in hardcover.  It's a very interesting history of the dinosaurs incorporating current science on them. It provides the current state of the art on fossil discovery, dinosaur evolution and the effect of plate tectonics and climate change, the impact of the meteor that ended the age of the dinosaurs, and the relationship of birds to dinosaurs, which is pretty simple - birds "are" dinosaurs.

If you leave a chicken alone long enough it will turn into a T-Rex. Seriously.  It's done it before.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World - Simon Winchester

I got this book for Grayson's birthday, but (of course) read it first.  It's a typical Winchester - fascinating stories and fascinating topics.  Especially if you're interested in the intersection of history and science.

Chariots for Apollo: The Making of the Lunar Module - Joshua Stoff & Charles R. Pellegrino

First of all, this can be a misleading book.  It was originally published as Chariots for Apollo: The making of the Lunar Module in 1985, then was reissued as "Chariots for Apollo: "The Untold Story Behind the Race to the Moon" in 1999.  Well, no, it's about the history of the lunar module, and it was hardly untold since it was published 14 years earlier.  (There is an unrelated book Chariots for Apollo: The NASA History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft to 1969 by Courtney G. Brooks that came out in 2009).

It's one of the few disappointing books I've read about the space program.  Pellegrino has an annoyingly overused tendency to comment on text "in" the text - something I remember from his book on the Titanic, and it's distracting and often confusing, since you can't always follow his train of thought.  Second, in a couple of places he just gave up trying to write and included transcripts of interviews he had with participants - a real WTF moment for me.

I have a pretty good understanding of the story of the challenges the engineers faced building the lunar module, and this doesn't tell it.  It skips over development to the management of the lunar module at KSC, and while that's an interesting story and he has lots of good anecdotes, it's just not a well told story.  I've read (and seen) better accounts of the LM story, as well as the KSC story.  This is way too idiosyncratic a book - you never forget that it's an author talking about a subject.

Flight: My Life in Mission Control - Christopher Kraft

Nope - not done with NASA just yet.  Someone recently recommended this as a good book on NASA, and boy, were they right.  Kraft was in the middle of everything from the unmanned Mercury flights through Apollo, and this book tells the story.  He pulls no punches, unloading on Scott Carpenter as the single bad astronaut in his experience, and tells the behind the scenes stories of many of the more notable episodes.

As a bonus, when I got this used copy in, I opened the cover, and it was autographed by Kraft himself.  Admittedly, my name isn't "Bob", but I will still take it.