Sadly, this opening epigraph was the ONLY good thing about this book.
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Sadly, this opening epigraph was the ONLY good thing about this book.
bailedIt's been a while since I've read a book that was so terrible that it actually made me angry. This was one of those books. It's a 389-page book that's supposed to be about the Union Carbide disaster that struck India in 1984, but the authors decided to wait until page 294 before they got to it. I'm not joking. It's as if they wanted to write about everything BUT the disaster. 😡😡😡 #2025Book4
so-so3.5⭐
I wanted to like this book more than I did. The narrator for the #audiobook had an incredibly soothing and easy to listen to voice. The firsthand accounts of the loss, devastation, resiliency, and strength were powerful. The book just felt too drawn out. If the author had condensed things a bit, which I fully believe he could have done without sacrificing the integrity of his work, then I think this would have easily been a 4-4.5 star read.
pickThis was an emotional read for me! I was in 4th grade in Florida when it happened. My class stepped outside to watch so I saw the explosion live in the sky. And in hindsight there were so many reasons to not launch that day 😔 The story was well told by the author.
By the time the design was complete...engineers... still believed they were employing a tried-and-tested joint for their new rocket: they had avoided any potentially dangerous innovation. But this was a convenient delusion.... in creating a man-rated, fail-safe joint they had also modified it so extensively that what they produced was, in effect, a quite new and experimental design.
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Cue the ominous soundtrack...
Day 11 of #12Booksof2024 is my favorite nonfiction read of the year
@Andrew65
#12Booksof2024 Day 9
My favorite book of September was The House is On Fire, which I read with my IRL book club.
@Andrew65
pickI read the author‘s note first and it made this story set in deadliest urban disaster in US history at the time (1811) even more disturbing. That a slave has no obituary in local papers to document one‘s time on earth is not shocking but incredibly sad. That a white man would prefer a wife dead to disabled and could make that happen - ugh! That a slave is compelled to run into danger to save whites from death is heroism beyond measure.
....the exercises [water survival drills] were conducted under the gaze of dozens of reporters and cameramen...
By now, each of the women understood that the novelty of being America's first female astronauts made them a focus of attention, but their patience was already fraying....
when, as she was being winched aloft by a helicopter, a photographer asked Sally Ride to make a "happy face" for the cameras, she simply yelled, "No!"
