Book Review: Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier by J. Ottaviani et al.

Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier written by Jim Ottaviani and artwork by Maris Wicks

This graphic novel looks at the experiences of female astronauts, centering on NASA astronaut and scientist Mary Cleave. As a child, she wrote a letter to President Eisenhower asking to join the Astronaut Corps. He wrote back graciously declining her offer. Her ambition remained and was eventually fulfilled. The book chronicles all the challenges that went into joining the space program, with a little side stop in the Soviet Union to tell the story of Valentina Ponomaryova, the first female in space. The bigger context of women joining the American space program naturally fits into Cleave's story as she works through school, the application process, and the training process in NASA.

The narrative is fascinating, whimsical, and delightful. Cleve can give an insider's view of the space program with a lot of nuance and fun anecdotes. Her first mission, on the Shuttle Atlantis, is told in detail toward the end of the book. The end includes the authors' list of resources and some book recommendations for further reading.

Highly recommended.

Book Review: Hawking by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick

Hawking written by Jim Ottaviani, art by Leland Myrick, and coloring by Aaron Polk

Stephen Hawking's life and career were rather amazing. He grew up in England as a brilliant student with an indefatigable sense of humor. Weirdly, he wasn't a particularly hard-working student, often coasting by on his intelligence, which let him finish assignments at the last minute. When he was twenty-one, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, better known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's Disease. The prognosis was death in a few months or a few years at most. That prediction was in 1963; he lived to 2018. He overcame a lot of odds.

The disease was slow to ravage his body. He was independently mobile for a long time, though nowadays everyone pictures him in his customized wheelchair with a machine to help him speak. His mind was alway vibrant and he did a lot of work in theoretical physics and cosmology. Those fields were considered a fertile ground since a lot of progress still had to be made. Einstein and quantum physics were big leaps forward, but reconciling the two, and both of them with more classical conceptions of science, along with developing new concepts, still had to be done. Hawking worked with many other scientists and scholars to produce many advancements in our understanding of the universe.

Hawking also lived a full life. He had two children. He traveled quite a bit, visiting universities and laboratories around the world. After he became a celebrity, traveling became harder as he would be more noticed and more likely to be approached. He took it all as it came.

This book covers a bit of everything, with most of the focus on Hawking's science. I enjoyed it to a degree but felt like there wasn't enough depth. Perhaps Hawking's life and scientific contributions are too much for a graphic novel treatment. Or I just needed to think of this as a general overview.

Slightly recommended.