Review: December 2009-January 2010

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Gifts for Budding Scientsts: For Advanced Readers

Everyone knows the 1959 portrait of the Mercury Seven astronauts: seven grinning guys in seven shiny silver suits looking smashing. Almost Astronauts tells the story of the thirteen female pilots who never made it into the silver suits. They passed the reliminary tests to qualify as astronauts, but were shut out at the behest of then vice-president Lyndon Baines Johnson. He explained privately that if he let women into the space program, “we’d have to let blacks in. . . .
We’d have to let every minority in, and we just can’t do it.” In the end, the men defeated the women with a catch-22: women could not become astronauts because they hadn’t been jet test pilots—but only men were allowed to be jet test pilots. Stone tells the story in the words of the time, lifted from old copies of Life, Look, and other popular accounts. Sadly, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and other American heroes made demeaning comments, in line with the sexism of their day. Almost Astronauts is an upsetting book, but a much truer portrait of an era than the many self-congratulatory celebrations of the Moon landing published this year.