No comments about Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jern.

No comments about I Want to Be a Mathematician: An Automathography in Three Parts (Maa Spectrum Series) (Maa Spectrum Ser.).

1 comments about Descartes: His Life and Thought.

1. Genevieve Rodis-Lew is Professor Emerita at the Sorbonne and has written a splendid biography on the life and thought of a major and influential 17th Century European philosopher. Ably translated into English by Jane Marie Todd, Descartes is vividly presented in the context of his time. Drawing upon his own correspondence, Rodis-Lewis traces his disillusion with the Jesuit scholastic method and his attraction mathematics and then to metaphysics. Descartes emerges for the modern reader as a complete and complex man, so much more than a mere footnote in the history of science or the evolution of western philosophical traditions.

1 comments about A Genetic and Cultural Odyssey: The Life and Work of L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza.

1. In recent years it has becomm possible to use DNA to trace human development. For instance the people of iceland believed themselves to be of Viking descent. DNA testing has shown that yes, the men of Iceland are of Viking descent. But the women came from England and Scotland. Apparently the Vikings stopped off to capture a few women on their way west.
   
   This little tidbit of knowledge is a mixture of multiple sciences and fields of study. The beliefs of the Icelanders has to come from a humanities perspective. The DNA evidence has to come from the hard science in the laboratory. (The supposition at the end is my own.)
   
   Dr. Cavalli-Sforza, as the title of this book says, has spent a lifetime of study spanning across many fields of study in the hard sciences and in many different areas of the humanities. This is a book that spans the globe from his offices in California and Italy to field studies in Africa and elsewhere.
   
   Written by an anthropologist and a geneticist, this book is also a good combination of crossing the fields of science and humanity.

3 comments about A Passion For Gold: An Autobiography.

1. While doing due diligence on The Cortez Trend in Nevada I came across this wonderful autobiography of the geologist that reinterpreted earlier work in the Nevada basin and range and discovered the Carlin Trend gold belt, also the Battle Mountain Trend and the Cortez Trend. Nevada had been scoured by prospectors since the gold rush of 1849 and the Comstock Lode silver discovery. Virtually all surface deposits had been found and exploited. The Carlin Trend is micro-gold which does not show up when panning, it must be assayed. With the advent of heap leaching Nevada has produced in excess of 600 million ounces of gold and this will continue for quite some time with the prospective development of The Cortez Trend. Dr Roberts tells of his work in the USGS in Central America during WWII, Nevada, Utah and Saudi Arabia. He gives us his reasons for believing the Ophir mine that produced the gold of King Solomon is in Saudi Arabia. It was very interesting to read about the life of a field geologist.



2. Excellent read with good intermix of personal and professional history. It is inspiring to read as well as educational. Thank you Dr. Roberts.



3. Ralph J. Roberts has found that a devotion to family and geology can lead to a life well lived and he relates the story of his life well in A Passion For Gold. Roberts spent 44 years with the United States Geological Survey and after retiring, became a private consultant. His most important discovery was the Carlin-type gold deposit. The reader with a non-geologic background will want access to a copy of the Glossary of Geology to help with the few technical sections included in the book [there is a glossary at the back of the book, but it is not thorough enough]. There are a few awkward sentences and some extraneous commas [I think, being the extra comma and awkward sentece king myself], but this is a suprisingly comfortable read considering that most of Mr. Roberts' earlier writings were technical papers. I trained as a mining/exploration geologist and so it was easy for me to relate to this autobiography, but non-geologists should find much of interest in Ralph Roberts' life story. It was on top of one of the mines near Battle Mountain, Nevada that Mr. Roberts writes about that I found myself deciding to abandon my masters thesis in geochemistry and to devote my life to the education of America's younger citizens [I teach earth science at the high school level]. I knew I couldn't help folks did big holes in the ground just for a little gold. I enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone with an interest in geology, but I can't give A Passion For Gold a full five stars because I think the technical sections could have been handled in a way that would have made this book a little more accessible to a wider audience.

No comments about Evolution And "the Sex Problem": American Narratives During The Eclipse Of Darwinism.

No comments about Darwin (In a Nutshell).

No comments about My Father, Sandy: A Son's Memoir.

No comments about John Garcia: Life of a Neuroethologist and History of Conditioned Taste Aversion.

5 comments about Schirra's Space (Bluejacket Books).

1. Wally Schirra, perhaps more than all the other "Original Seven"
   Mercury astronauts, embodies all the great strengths along
   with the weaknesses of this group compared with the astronauts
   who entered the space program after them.
   It must be remembered that when the original astronauts were
   chosen in 1959, manned spaceflight was a great unknown. In particular,
   it was not known how the human body would responds to all the stresses
   caused by the massive accelerations and decelerations of the spacecraft
   in addition to the problems of prolonged "weightlessness". Thus,
   those astronauts chosen were found to be able to withstand worst-case
   scenarios for these things. Piloting skills were not as important
   because the astronaut didn't really have much control of the Mercury
   spacecraft.
   By the time Schirra flew on his Sigma 7 flight (the fifth of the series), it had been found that the psychological and physiological stresses were not that great. In addition, the flight before his, Aurora 7, by Scott Carpenter was a near disaster because he did a poor job doing what little
   piloting he could. Thus Schirra was called on to show that, indeed, with
   good piloting skills, precise maneuvers could be carried out. Using what
   Schirra called "the light stuff", Schirra proved that a skilled pilot can
   do what has to be done while conserving precious fuel.
   By the time the much more advanced two-man Gemini spacecraft came to fly, it was now necessary to carry out far more sophisticated missions, involving rendezvous, docking and EVA. Schirra in his Gemini 6 mission, along with Tom Stafford, spectacularly carried out the first rendezvous when his spacecraft met up with the already orbiting Gemini 7. Schirra was the perfect choice because he showed that the "light stuff" can
   allow complicated space operations of the type needed to land on the Moon using the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous mode within the fuel constraints that were available. He also saved his Gemini mission when the Titan II booster rocket's engines cut off seconds after ignition and Schirra's
   outstanding "feel" as a pilot told him NOT to carry out a very dangerous
   ejection, so the mission was saved to fly another day.
   Gemini training using simulations was far more complicated than those for Mercury and the veteran Mercury astronauts who flew Gemini like Schirra and Gordon Cooper found them more exhausting.
   After the Apollo 1 fire, Schirra was once again called in to save the manned spaceprogram and was assigned the first Apollo flight. By this time, as he put it in his own words, he was being "devoured" by the space program. Fellow crewman Walt Cunningham felt that Schirra really didn't want to fly the mission but he pushed himself to do it out of a feeling of responsibility to his friend and fellow Mercury astronaut Gus Grisson who perished in the fire. This flight (called Apollo 7) not only would break in a new spacecraft that was far more sophisticated than the already complex Gemini spacecraft. Whenever flying a new spacecraft, there are always uncertainties as to whether all the bugs have shaken out, and in addition, the simulation training was even more time consuming and exhausting. All these things took their toll on Schirra, and the pressures came bursting out of him during the flight when he became ill with a head cold. Schirra began berating the flight controllers which enraged Chris Kraft, the head of flight operations.
   Also, even though the mission was scheduled to last 11 days in order to
   test the ability to last the duration of a lunar landing flight, Schirra
   adamantly opposed carrying out more than a minimal number of scientific experiments. This was another legacy of the Mercury astronauts who loved flying but generally had little interest in the scientific aspects of space exploration. Thus, Walt Cunningham felt that the mission, although proving the spacecraft
   was spaceworthy, wasted a lot of time that could have been used to
   carry out more experiments and which would have alleviated their boredom
   on the last days of the mission. Schirra even objected to carrying at TV camera on board, but NASA management insisted, saying the taxpayers had the right to see what their billions of dollars were going for. In this matter, Schirra relented.
   Fortunately, as the moon landings approached, NASA began to choose astronauts who weren't as "tough" as the Original Seven, but they were better educated scientifically and technically, and they were better able to handle and understand the complex systems that made up the Apollo spacecraft, and they had more of a willingness to study geology and other scientific disciplines which Apollo's space exploration capabilites would enable space and planetary scientists to exploit.
   Like all the other astronaut autobiographies, with the notable exception
   of Mike Collins' "Carrying the Fire", this one does not really describe
   what spaceflight is really like, nor will the reader will not really learn much more about America's space program by reading this book.
   However, American owes Wally Schirra a lot. He stepped in twice when the
   space program was in crisis and his exceptional piloting skills (maybe the best of the Original Seven) put America on its path to the Moon.



2. As much as I was a fan of Wally Schirra during his days in the space program, or perhaps because of that, I was mildly disappointed in his autobiography. This work strikes me as typical of a number of astronaut biographies and autobiographies rushed into print over the past generation or so, rather unremarkable in literary style and adding little to the historiography of this critical era of space travel.
   
   Perhaps this should not be surprising. The author identifies himself as a technical man who throughout his military career kept his nose to the grind of precision flying and admits to little connectedness to the culture outside. No one should take up this work and expect to find Astronaut Schirra's opinion of "My Fair Lady." To the day of its publication the author through his book exudes continued pride in his association with other pilots of exceptional competence, and conversely, an avoidance of those who in his view are or were more form than substance. [Chuck Yeager, for example, will probably never grace the Schirra Thanksgiving table.] If Schirra is infected with hubris, it comes honorably.
   
   Schirra is the antithesis of the joker and clown he was sometimes depicted as in, say, "The Right Stuff." It is within the world of test flying and space exploration that the reader will best connect with Schirra: learning, for example, that Schirra had little use for the extensive battery of medical tests to which all the early astronaut candidates were subjected. He was highly critical of the early conceptualization of Project Mercury. He was among those who considered early spaceflight "Spam in a Can" and lobbied extensively for pilot control in all of the various programs in which he served. His blunt talk, however, made sense as events would prove.
   
   One can probably argue with credibility that Schirra was one of the half-dozen most competent pilots of the entire Mercury-Apollo era. His Sigma 7 flight in October, 1962, was a quantum leap for Mercury in terms of both distance and fuel economy. But his greatest contribution to the space program may have come in December, 1965, when in a four day period the author not only averted a major space catastrophe but achieved a technical breakthrough of major importance for reaching the moon.
   
   Gemini 6 was a star-crossed flight from opening day. Scheduled for October, 1965, its mission objective was rendezvous with an unmanned Agena rocket launched hours earlier. The Agena inexplicably blew up before Schirra's and Tom Stafford's craft was launched, and the mission went into temporary limbo. However, after much discussion about feasibility, Gemini 6 was rescheduled for a December launch, with its new rendezvous target being nothing less than Gemini 7, the 14-day endurance epic of Frank Borman and Jim Lovell.
   
   Gemini 7 was launched successfully early in December, and after a mere nine day turnaround of the Gemini launch pad--itself a record of sorts--the author and Stafford were ready to launch Gemini 6 in pursuit of Borman and Lovell. But in what has to be one of the more hair-raising moments of the space program, Gemini 6's launch rocket shut down a millisecond before lifting off the ground. The various disastrous scenarios were as numerous as the imagination permitted. In his own printed words Schirra is quite matter of fact about this dilemma and his now-famous choice against capsule ejection--which, incidentally, saved the rendezvous mission itself, as matters would transpire. For the historical record, Schirra sees his decision as the vindication of human pilots over computer guidance, and he seems proudest of this maneuver and the mission that followed.
   
   He is right to be proud. If Schirra's instincts served him well atop Gemini 6 on the ground, his piloting skills three days later would set the space program ahead by leaps and bounds. Gemini 6 found its target in minimum time and milked the maximum possible navigational experience from the rendezvous. Gemini 6 established that with a skilled pilot a space vehicle could pretty much go wherever needed, an indispensable technical advance for moon landing technology.
   
   Gemini 6 may have been Schirra's finest hour in the space program. It would be different after that. The fiery death of his old Mercury sidekick Gus Grissom in 1967 left Schirra as the only active member of the original seven astronauts and raised doubts in his mind about the Apollo Program in general. Apollo was exponentially more complicated than the Mercury Program for which he was chosen. Schirra has plenty to say about Apollo management, but there is a hint in his reflections that the Mercury crew [which included, at least hypothetically, Cooper, Slayton, Shepard and himself] might have been "over the hill" when Apollo took center stage. [182]
   
   Schirra's comportment before and during Apollo 7, the first of the Apollo manned flights, has been the subject of considerable conjecture. This reader's impression is that Schirra had reservations about the vehicle, but more so with the management team behind it. The author complains that he was misled about guidelines for acceptable launch time wind velocities, and once in flight, pressured to perform tasks that interfered with basic shake-down procedures. The author's head cold while in space would later take on humorous proportions in his award winning Actifed TV commercials, but at the time his general health and its impact upon flight procedure became major ground to space confrontations. But in rare candor for an astronaut, Schirra admitted the unthinkable--Apollo 7 was boring him out of his mind by mid-flight. [203]
   
   Schirra had announced his retirement before Apollo 7, and if Deke Slayton is to be believed, the author would never again have to worry about space boredom, as his crewmates Eisele and Cunningham ruefully discovered. The happy ending to this tale is Schirra's personal pride and contentment at his career's body of work and the ongoing respect he enjoyed from the top professionals in his field at the time of his book`s publication in 1988.
   
   .



3. Not even factually correct in some cases.. as when Wally implies that he got the LLTV training cancelled because it was dangerous. Wrong !!! It was used through Apollo 17. I own over a hundred aviation and space books, but this one I gave to Good Will after I read it.



4. Wally Shirra doesn't lack for confidence. Then again how would a person, without the self confidence of a test pilot, strap himself to a rocket? A great insider's view of the program. However for all his confidence Shirra goes out of his way to not cast a single stone at the many people he crossed paths with through out his career. A class act. No new real information is uncovered through this book. Just a fun read.



5. I long have been a huge fan of Wally Schirra. I have always adored his keen sense of humor and wit. Furthermore, his impeccable aviator and astronaut careers always made me feel awe struck. Therefore, I greatly looked forward to reading Mr. Schirra's account of his career. My main interest was to get a real insiders look into the space program - which I believe the book did successfully on some major points. Mr. Schirra's wit pleasantly shined throughout the book - this made the reading more pallatable. Regretfully, the reason for my three star rating is the fact that the book would ramble. Without a moments notice, it would jump ahead in time and backward in time. I found this fact to be very irritating as I tried to stay focused and gain as much information as I could from my reading. I thought that maybe I was being too critical, but this sore spot was evident throughout the book. By the time that I had finished the book, I felt exaspirated from the time warps. Do not get me wrong, Mr. Wally Schirra is still a brilliant man in my eyes - I just found that the book was not a good representation of the the true great man that he is. All in all, for the average reader, I feel that this book has many good bits of information - as long as you are willing to sift through the minutia of time jumps.