|
Cady Coleman - Sharing Space: An Astronaut's Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change |
- By Hawkeye7
Cady Coleman is a retired US astronaut who flew two space shuttle missions and a tour of duty on the International Space Station. She was a career US Air Force officer who was selected with NASA Astronaut Group 14 ("The Hogs") in 1992. I have quite a few astronaut biographies. This one is a bit different. There are no dates, and the narrative jumps about quite a bit, although it is in more or less chronological order. It is cast in the mould of one of those self-help books, full of platitudes, pithy truisms and the occasional tidbit of potentially useful life advice. The title is an allusion to fellow astronaut Chris Hadfield's An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth (2013), but Hadfield tells you more about his life in space than on Earth: this book does the opposite. There are many similarities between the two books in terms of structure, but ultimately Hadfield's is the much better book.
While Coleman insists on how important her work was to her (and we have no reason to doubt it at all, because she maintained a long-distant relationship with a husband in Massachusetts and had to shuttle between there and Houston all the time), she does not give us many details about what she did, just the occasional morsel. And there is nothing about her high school or college, although we know she was asked about it in her astronaut interview. The same goes for her Air Force career: I wished for far more detail here. Of her scientific work on the space station, someone with only this book to go on would assume she spent most of her time playing the flute. There are fun factoids though. She reveals that she and Pam Melroy wore the same clothes to their NASA job interview. And that she thought that only women did this, until Scott Kelly revealed to her that he and his identical twin brother Mark Kelly wore the same suit to their interviews. Stuff like that. (There are also no pictures.)
It came as a surprise to me to read vociferous criticism of the rampant sexism of NASA (and occasionally of the United States in general, but we all know about that). My surprise was due to the fact that the time Coleman became an astronaut, women had been serving in that role in the US for more than ten years. A painful example: NASA's decision to save money by not buying small and extra-large size space suits. This was a problem, because of a concurrent requirement for EVA accreditation for astronauts serving aboard the International Space Station. Without it, you could only fly Space Shuttle missions. This affected women mostly; when men complained that they needed the extra-large size, NASA agreed to reinstate extra-large suits, but not the small ones. So Coleman trained in a medium-size suit that was too large for her, which was literally painful. As it happened, she never had to perform a spacewalk, but with the qualification she was able to serve on the station. (When the Space Shuttle was retired, they retired this rule as well.)
Publishing details: Coleman, Cady (2024). Sharing Space: An Astronaut's Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change. New York: Viking. ISBN 978-0-593-49401-1. OCLC 1347428435.
David Kohnen - King's Navy: Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King and the Rise of American Sea Power, 1897-1947 |
- By Hawkeye7
I was working on Ernest J. King's article, and just when I thought it was safe, this new biography appeared. King, the United States Navy's second most senior admiral of World War II, has not been as popular a research subject as William D. Leahy (the most senior) but there has been two full-length biographies: Walter Muir's Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record (1952) and Thomas B. Buell's Master of Sea Power (1995). So I ordered a copy of this new one. The first thing that surprised me when it arrived in the post was the size of the book: it is 656 pages long, with illustrations, and quite heavy. Inside, the difficulty of King as a biographical subject soon becomes apparent.
David Kohnen is the Captain Tracy Barrett Kittredge Professor of War Studies and Maritime History at the U.S. Naval War College in Annapolis. Although he's American, he earned his PhD from the University of London, King's College. This is an important point, as some post-war commentators saw King as Anglophobic. Like King, Kohnen is familiar with both sides of the Atlantic. He has managed to find new sources and additional perspectives. This book therefore contains much that is new, and much that is interesting.
At the same time, there are many gaps and the narrative jumps about. Sometimes, events are out of sequence. For example, the account of King informing journalists of Eisenhower's selection as Supreme Commander in Europe is placed with the discussion of the 1943 Quebec Conference (p. 360) but it actually took place after Tehran in December 1943. There are annoying errors too: the "Y" in Consolidated PBY Catalina stands for the manufacturer (Consolidated), not that they were heavier than air (p. 179); Brehon B. Somervell was a lieutenant general, not a colonel (p. 328); the Chindwin River is in Burma, not Malaya (p. 358). (Proof reading is pretty dismal too.) So, ironically, the reader who will get the most out of this book will be one who, like myself, has already read Muir or Buell or both.
This becomes a running theme through the book, as Kohnen tries to defend King against various accusations without specifying what they were. If the reader does not know what this is about, then this will go over their head. For example, Kohnen mentions the British loaning trawlers to the US Navy, but does not state why they did this or what they were for. So he defends King against the charge of Anglophobia and ignoring British advice, while ignoring the elephant in the room: Operation Drumbeat, which is never mentioned at all. He defends King against charges that he shafted his predecessor as CNO, Admiral Harold R. Stark, but this does not align with the record. In his November 1944 endorsement to the Navy Court of Inquiry into the Pearl Harbor fiasco, King wrote:
The derelictions on the part of Admiral Stark and Admiral Kimmel were faults of omission rather than faults of commission. In the case in question, they indicate lack of the superior judgment necessary for exercising command commensurate with their rank and their assigned duties, rather than culpable inefficiency.
This is but one of several cases of King concluding that someone was not up to the job they were doing while continuing to let them do it! (The reader will tire of how many times Kohnen feels obliged to tell us that King considered Chester Nimitz to be a "fixer" - someone adept as using back channels - which King used as an insult.)
Just as Leahy's biographers struggled to distinguish Leahy's opinions from those of Roosevelt, so King's have difficulty distinguishing those of King from those of the Navy. Perhaps the two cannot be separated after all.
Publishing details: Kohnen, David (2024). King's Navy: Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King and the Rise of American Sea Power, 1897-1947. Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schiffer. ISBN 978-0-7643-6837-0. OCLC 1425097130.
Recent external book reviews |
Morton, Nicholas (2022). The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (First ed.). New York City: Basic Books. ISBN 9781541616295.
- Hanauer, Joseph (February 2025). "Review of Nicholas Morton. The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East". H-War, H-Net Reviews.
White, Ronald C. (2024). On Great Fields: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and His Fight to Save the Union. New York City: Random House. ISBN 9780525510109.
- Klingenberg., Mitchell G. (28 February 2025). "Chamberlain's War". Law & Liberty.
Stille, Mark (2024). Midway-Class Aircraft Carriers 1945-92. Oxford: Osprey Publishing. ISBN 9781472860484.
- Bosbotinis, James (25 February 2025). "Midway-Class Aircraft Carriers 1945-92". The Naval Review.
Denoël, Yvonnick (2024). Vatican Spies: From the Second World War to Pope Francis. La Vergne, Tennessee: Hurst Publishers. ISBN 978-1-911723-40-0.
- Platten, Stephen (14 February 2025). "Book review: Vatican Spies: From the Second World War to Pope Francis by Yvonnick Denoël, translated by Alan McKay". Church Times.
|
You must be logged in to post a comment.