The SIX-NonF First Six Women Astronauts-Should be Interesting but for Naught

Loren Grush is a reporter for Bloomberg News covering space travel and a host for the online show "Space Craft". Her parents were both NASA engineers and she grew up around Space Shuttles and Nasa astronauts. "The Six" focuses on the first women to be selected as astronauts and given the opportunities to travel into space. The subjects promised an exciting foray into a new frontier. Unfortunately, Grush's book is a grueling read as it delves overridingly into the minutiae of details about the women's personal lives outside the space program.  The repetitive meme is on the glass ceiling broken by these women. This trope feels trivial in today's world and the missed opportunities for what the experiences were like would've been far more compelling but were buried under copious anecdotes of little note. Grush's concluding comment resonates along with the style of her reporting which was shamefully fawning and wearisome. "They didn't have any women {astronaut} role models. They were doing it for the first time. For those of us who followed, we had the role models. So that made us more comfortable, more confident, and more welcome." Even the chapter on the Challenger explosion in '86 which carried an educator for the first time into space was centered askew. There was nothing revelatory. Furthermore, this catastrophic disaster was presented with little emotional impact. There is nothing exciting to stimulate or encourage young people to venture into careers as engineers or astronauts. Whereas there were many topics Grush might've examined. For instance, I'd wanted to know more about the training required, and first-hand interviews from these women were flagrantly missing.  What did it feel like in space for these women and what did they think they contributed, gained and found most difficult. Moreover, Grush unfairly spoke for the astronauts in the program following the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in Jan. '86, which made them sound petty. "Grief gripped their hearts and uncertainty hung heavy in the air. Underlying the sorrow, each astronaut thought the same thing, but they didn't dare say their fears out loud: Could this be the end of the Space Shuttle program?" As a reporter in the aeronautics field, Grush was grounded in inconsequential details. She failed to gather interviews from any of the surviving women or people with first hand accounts to make a soaring account about trailblazing women in space travel and exploration. 

NonF Matt Haig's "Reasons to Stay Alive"

Matt Haig is a journalist, writer of Y/A novels and novels. His novels are magical, whimsical and profoundly life affirming, In Haig's autobiographical book REASONS to STAY ALIVE, he candidly talks about the debilitating depression he's suffered. Furthermore, he offers pragmatic suggestions that helped him cope through his dark abyss of despair, how he staves depression's downward gravitational pull and reasons to be grateful he's found in simple and astonishing moments. Haig muses, "I think life always provides reasons to not die, if we listen hard enough. Those reasons can stem from the past-the people who raised us, maybe, or friends or lovers-or from the future possibilities we would be switching off." Perhaps, the single most sagacious contemplation for not committing suicide "is this option isn't flexible." Everyone's experiences are unique, yet knowing there are others stricken with the malady of malaise and "knowing that other things work for other people" combats the pain and provides rays of comfort.  Honest, heartwarming and hopeful best describes "Reasons to Stay Alive." It's never tricky and never strikes the tone of a self-help book. It reads like an intimate conversation that is redeeming without being self-righteous or off-putting.  Rather, it's sobering. He confides an omnipresent crevice that one has to be leary, lest you fall. Haig is most helpful when noting tools he's called upon. Furthermore, he shares his joys and wonder with what he would've missed out on had he given into his desire, not to stop living per se but to end an overbearing anguish and withdraw from misery. Haig's description of his depression is enlightening.  "You don't feel fully inside yourself. You feel like you are controlling your body from somewhere else. It is like the distance between a writer and their fictional, semi-autobiographical narrator. The center that is you has gone. It is a feeling between the mind and the body, once again proving to the sufferer that to separate the two as crudely as we do is wrong, and simplistic. And, maybe even part of the problem." Haig reasons those in the throes of depression "clam up and don't speak about it, which is a shame, as speaking about it helps. Words spoken or written are what connects us to the world, and so speaking about to people, and writing about this stuff, helps connect us to each other, and to our true selves."  Here are a few sage pieces of advice he's listed. "Shower before noon. Be kind. Look at trees. If someone loves you, let them. Don't worry about the time you lose to despair. The time you will have afterward has just doubled its value. If the sun is shining and you can be outside, be outside."  My advice is to read Matt Haig novels and his memoir, "Reasons to Stay Alive". 

Poet Jesse Nathan Recites Poetry at 222 for a Fortunate Few

Jesse Nathan's poems have appeared in The Paris Review, the Yale Review and The Nation. He was named winner of the 2024 New Writers Award in Poetry. Nathan's a prof. of literature at UC Berkeley. Luckily for me, I heard him recite from his debut poetry collection, "Eggtooth" with an intimate few at The 222 on Saturday.  Saturday night in the town of Healdsburg had a lot going on, including a free concert by the Healdsburg Symphony in a tribute to the music of John Williams. I sneaked in late to hear the last few selections from the all brass and percussion orchestra conducted by Ken Collins. I was already jubilant from Nathan's poetry reading. Nathan shared his split childhood, having been born and raised in Berkeley and then moving at 11 with his parents and brother to rural Kansas.  His mother's Mennonite family has lived on farmlands in Kansas for several generations. The culture shock made Jesse a bit of an oddball outsider with his long hair and city garb. Thankfully, life was filled with unsupervised exploration with his brother and cousins as they roamed freely along the creeks and rural fields. The wide open spaces were a welcome if not daunting adjustment to his new life in farm country. Nathan's mother and her family are all Mennonite and his father Jewish. Nathan said, "This gave me another duality in addition to splitting my time between Berkeley and my family in Kansas" to grapple with which "made art out of not, not being able to create art." Nathan read with his rich, soothing voice, from his poems elaborating upon his immersion in nature and an affinity for the sparse array of trees. I found his lyrical poetry resplendent with wonder.  I've captured several phrases from the various poems that resonated with me which I have spliced together to create a whole from fractured fragments. 

As if a shadow had a shadow - Her breasts went flying and froth became her hair - To eat one's fortunes raw - Words pay not all, speak so I can see your arguing voices - light appears cuspid - His noiseless blooming, mouth open to the murk - Where sleep doesn't house sleep beyond the trees - The grass is hissing don't breath that sigh - Dinosaur bones got planted by God to amuse us - Always bit parts he asks, Always - there's an accuracy but no precision - Use me like an egg tooth, use me sustained to sing and fly - each message returned to the ether, our alcove of meanwhile. 

K Lipionka's The LAST PLACE YOU LOOK- First Rate Female Private Eye Takes No Prisoners

THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK is a crime novel with a tenacious female investigator whose unorthodox style, solves crimes by thinking outside the box. Roxane (spelt with one n) is nobody's fool. She likes her whiskey, women and working outside the law. She's a no holds barred broad who wisely trusts herself and her instincts searching for missing persons and solving murder mysteries. Roxane is the daughter of a beloved, former cop who died in the line of duty. And, as much as Roxane admired her late dad, she's got her own methods for doing things, which has served her well. Well, at least until now. Roxanne is contacted by the sister of a convicted double murderer, Brad Stockton. Brad has maintained his innocence in the grisly slaying of the parents of his high school sweetheart, Sarah. His execution is scheduled just weeks away. Brad's sister believes her brother is innocent. She's desperate to find the real killer and exonerate her brother before his execution date. Brad's sister, hires Roxane in desperation and offers her some leads into the investigation. The story takes place in a small New England town where everyone knows one another. The memory of Sarah's disappearance (and presumed death) along with her parent's double murders still shrouds the town's populace and police. I found the pace of the case circuitous but Roxane kept me curious with her indefatigable determination to follow-up on all tangential leads. Her injuries lead her search for the disappearance of another young teen whose MIA may or may not tie in with the Stockton case. The author's characterization of Roxane as both dogmatic and tender, renders a fascinating detective. Roxane's queer and hetero-relationships, family dysfunction and independence all add up to a detective the reader wants to uncover. She comes up against police brutality who warn her away from her sleuthing which discovered the bodies of two other women who had gone missing. While Roxane's investigation goes awry. She's arrested, then fired. Still, she's undeterred to help find the teen she recently met who's missing.  As Roxane sees it, "I'm the world's worst detective. I set out to prove this woman {Sarah} was still alive, and instead I found {another} body. I was supposed to be helping my client's brother get out of jail, but instead I think I might have implicated him in another crime." I think things get tied up a little too neatly at the end, wrapped in a bow tied up in  a cloying bow of coincidences on top.  Nevertheless, once I started reading, I just couldn't stop. In fact, I'm going to look into other books by Lipionka's in her series featuring her feral, crime solving sleuth.