Challenger by Adam Higginbotham

 Science and adventure comes with a challenge which changes the world for good or for bad.

The journey of space program is a lot about science but it is also about how the people who were not scientists end up having a bigger say in what is to be done or not, knowing or not knowing the consequences.

Challenger is a milestone in space program. But it had its bad moments and while reading this book, we can see that a lot of them were avoidable. This is the thought in retrospection, and it is not easy to understand what was driving the actions and decisions when it was actually happening.

Oneupmanship, greed and sycophancy was driving a lot of these disasters but the lives lost is an eternal black spot on all the success that Challenger program achieved. The lives which were sacrificed for the advancement of the research, and largely to stay ahead in the space race.

The memory of the dead will fad away one day and only the shining achievements will remain. Its an injustice but justice was not the first thought when it all started.

Peace

The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk

Of course it was picked up for Nobel prize; a fiction in a long time.

But yeah, the story!

Becoming Beauvoir by Kate Kirkpatrick

How is it possible that the life of someone becomes bigger than their work?

This is the case here when people who don't know anything about Beauvoir's work have a working knowledge of her personal life and affairs. Even Sartre was not untouched by this curiosity.

Gossip is a part of social discourse but why does it over power the existence of a human being behind that gossip. It over shadows so much that a serious school of thought gets lost (not even second position) behind the scandalous stories true or otherwise.

This book also fall a bit short but can still be excused that this is a biography and not a commentary of Beauvoir's work. But still it over does it. The idea that the details which sell and which makes a person who they are are two different things but their is always a choice.

Beauvoir was not an ordinary person in her intellect and in life.

Surprisingly, her life story still sells but not her ideas.

Peace