At some point, I’ll read Loren Grush’s The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts.
But I didn’t request a review copy, because I suspect it’s a lot like Lynn Sherr’s biography of Sally Ride. I had — well, chose — to endure that nightmare nine years ago. Not eager to experience anything like it, anytime soon. Here’s my review.
Enjoy?
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Sally Ride was smart and gutsy. She earned a Ph.D. in physics from a premier university and made the dangerous journey to and from orbit twice.
But Ride wasn’t irreproachable. She had traits unsavory as well as virtuous. Those looking for a perceptive assessment of her life won’t find it in Lynn Sherr’s cloying, bromide-ridden Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space (Simon & Shuster; 374 pages; $28.00).
An accomplished tennis player — a pro career was a real possibility — Ride earned three degrees in physics from Stanford. The native Californian applied to NASA in 1977. Beating long odds, she joined Astronaut Group 8, the first class assembled since the Apollo era — and the first to include women. Ride, a workaholic, aced the training regimen, and her mastery of the “Canadarm,” a tool to deploy and retrieve payloads, got noticed. In April 1982, she was selected, over five female competitors, to fly on the seventh shuttle mission.
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