Bruce McCandless III's Blog: From Here to Infirmity
October 24, 2023
Big, Bold, and Utterly Unconventional
It seems like I've been working on this novel forever. It's the story of the creation of a musical on Broadway just after the Civil War, and involves gangs, young love, mistaken identities, revenge, blackmail, and spies. It's a lot. But at long last I feel comfortable with my cast of characters, to wit:
Dramatis Personae
In Order of Appearance
Dennis Carmody. The father of Katie and Michael Carmody, he’s an immigrant widower and a staunch Union man. Appalled by the Draft Riots that break out in New York City in July of 1863, he ventures into the streets in an attempt to stop the carnage.
Timothy “Black Tim” Kerrigan. Saloon-keeper and leader of one faction of the Dead Rabbits, an Irish criminal gang instrumental in starting the riots. Kerrigan is a clever thug, known for extortion, robbery, and an increasingly popular pale ale. He’s a known partner of Goo Goo Knox and Three-Finger Bobby O’Brien, and an unsuspected associate of a certain influential uptown swell.
Wilhelm Freitag, aka “Billy Friday.” Katie Carmody’s suitor. Big, powerful, and vicious. A sometime pimp and gangland shoulder puncher. An associate of the Dead Rabbits, but not a trusted member. Flashy and outwardly prosperous.
Sean Molloy. Dead Rabbits henchman and sidekick to Billy Friday. Lanky and pale. Hears God calling, but doesn’t understand the words.
Ferdinand Daguerre. Bumbling special effects expert, absent-minded engineer and sometime pyromaniac. Enthusiastic. Emotional. Sports a mustache big enough to hang a jacket on.
Clyde Bartos. A down-on-his-luck actor and playwright, plump and frequently perspiring. With customary imprudence, Bartos is taking a final swing at glory with a melodrama called The Golden Dove that he’s written and is attempting to produce.
William Blevins. A former actor and playwright, more esteemed as the former than the latter, now manager of the aging theatre called Cosmo’s Garden. Fastidious and severe. Judges books by their cover, though he seldom reads them in any case.
Henry Eccleston. Once Broadway’s golden boy, now a middle-aged producer/impresario with thinning hair. He’s planning a comeback with an elaborate French faerie play called The Magic Grotto when circumstances step up and kick him in the teeth. Mercurial and immensely sentimental. Hates to drink, but does it anyway, to keep up appearances.
Raymond St. Clair. Wealthy merchant and prominent member of Manhattan society. A son of the South, though he prefers not to advertise the connection. The city’s ninth-richest man, he owns a number of lucrative commercial enterprises—as well as the stately but outdated theatre called Cosmo’s Garden.
Alexander St. Clair. Raymond’s nephew. An Amherst graduate, Southern by birth but Northern in his upbringing and outlook. He briefly wore the uniform of a Union cavalry officer but never saw action. New to the city. Idealistic. An easy mark.
Gustav Favron. Assistant producer of a French ballet company who joins the production team of The Magic Grotto in Paris and journeys to America. Knows just enough English to get himself in trouble—and promptly does so.
Rose Catherine “Katie” Carmody. A struggling young seamstress, high-spirited, unambitious, and somewhat clumsy. Has trouble seeing horizons. Mystified by her own talent.
Leola Heins. Of African-American and Dutch ancestry, she lives with Katie in the Five Points neighborhood of lower Manhattan. A virtuoso with needle and thread, Leola is Katie’s best friend, and pays the bulk of the rent.
Jake Apple. Sixth son of free-thinking Jewish immigrants, Jake is the theater correspondent for the New York Sentinel. Grew up in Kleindeutschland on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Source of considerable information about the city and its criminal demimonde.
Margaret “Maximum Maggie” Mulvaney. A tattooed, beetle-browed woman of thirty-four years. Known to join the Dead Rabbits in their battles with cops and the Protestant Know-Nothings who target Irish immigrants. She looks after Katie and Leola Heins, and in fact is infatuated with Leola.
Jesse Wayne Scruggs. Trim and compact, a bitter unsmiling man who served as a sergeant in the Confederate Army. Lost his left hand during the siege of Vicksburg. Believes Lee should have kept fighting. He burns to avenge the defeat of the Confederacy.
Michael Carmody. Katie’s younger brother. Formerly a private in the 69th New York Infantry, the “Irish Brigade.” Shot in the shoulder and hip at Fredericksburg. He received opium pills to dull the pain of his wounds as he died. But he survived.
Menelaus Castor Klissas. Greek-American stage manager, burly and brusque but occasionally kind-hearted, which he almost always regrets.
George C. Jarrett. Henry Eccleston’s partner, and the more stable of the two. A stocky, thin-lipped individual with wiry hair and hirsute ears and knuckles, careless of his dress and manner. Mechanically minded. Likes wrenches, ropes, and pulleys.
General Lucius LeClerc. A retired Union general, gruff and gregarious. Brother-in-law of George Jarrett and one of Lincoln’s favorite commanders. LeClerc is believed to be on the short list for either governor of New York or vice-president on a future Republican ticket. Fears no one but his wife, and her only when sober.
Dramatis Personae
In Order of Appearance
Dennis Carmody. The father of Katie and Michael Carmody, he’s an immigrant widower and a staunch Union man. Appalled by the Draft Riots that break out in New York City in July of 1863, he ventures into the streets in an attempt to stop the carnage.
Timothy “Black Tim” Kerrigan. Saloon-keeper and leader of one faction of the Dead Rabbits, an Irish criminal gang instrumental in starting the riots. Kerrigan is a clever thug, known for extortion, robbery, and an increasingly popular pale ale. He’s a known partner of Goo Goo Knox and Three-Finger Bobby O’Brien, and an unsuspected associate of a certain influential uptown swell.
Wilhelm Freitag, aka “Billy Friday.” Katie Carmody’s suitor. Big, powerful, and vicious. A sometime pimp and gangland shoulder puncher. An associate of the Dead Rabbits, but not a trusted member. Flashy and outwardly prosperous.
Sean Molloy. Dead Rabbits henchman and sidekick to Billy Friday. Lanky and pale. Hears God calling, but doesn’t understand the words.
Ferdinand Daguerre. Bumbling special effects expert, absent-minded engineer and sometime pyromaniac. Enthusiastic. Emotional. Sports a mustache big enough to hang a jacket on.
Clyde Bartos. A down-on-his-luck actor and playwright, plump and frequently perspiring. With customary imprudence, Bartos is taking a final swing at glory with a melodrama called The Golden Dove that he’s written and is attempting to produce.
William Blevins. A former actor and playwright, more esteemed as the former than the latter, now manager of the aging theatre called Cosmo’s Garden. Fastidious and severe. Judges books by their cover, though he seldom reads them in any case.
Henry Eccleston. Once Broadway’s golden boy, now a middle-aged producer/impresario with thinning hair. He’s planning a comeback with an elaborate French faerie play called The Magic Grotto when circumstances step up and kick him in the teeth. Mercurial and immensely sentimental. Hates to drink, but does it anyway, to keep up appearances.
Raymond St. Clair. Wealthy merchant and prominent member of Manhattan society. A son of the South, though he prefers not to advertise the connection. The city’s ninth-richest man, he owns a number of lucrative commercial enterprises—as well as the stately but outdated theatre called Cosmo’s Garden.
Alexander St. Clair. Raymond’s nephew. An Amherst graduate, Southern by birth but Northern in his upbringing and outlook. He briefly wore the uniform of a Union cavalry officer but never saw action. New to the city. Idealistic. An easy mark.
Gustav Favron. Assistant producer of a French ballet company who joins the production team of The Magic Grotto in Paris and journeys to America. Knows just enough English to get himself in trouble—and promptly does so.
Rose Catherine “Katie” Carmody. A struggling young seamstress, high-spirited, unambitious, and somewhat clumsy. Has trouble seeing horizons. Mystified by her own talent.
Leola Heins. Of African-American and Dutch ancestry, she lives with Katie in the Five Points neighborhood of lower Manhattan. A virtuoso with needle and thread, Leola is Katie’s best friend, and pays the bulk of the rent.
Jake Apple. Sixth son of free-thinking Jewish immigrants, Jake is the theater correspondent for the New York Sentinel. Grew up in Kleindeutschland on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Source of considerable information about the city and its criminal demimonde.
Margaret “Maximum Maggie” Mulvaney. A tattooed, beetle-browed woman of thirty-four years. Known to join the Dead Rabbits in their battles with cops and the Protestant Know-Nothings who target Irish immigrants. She looks after Katie and Leola Heins, and in fact is infatuated with Leola.
Jesse Wayne Scruggs. Trim and compact, a bitter unsmiling man who served as a sergeant in the Confederate Army. Lost his left hand during the siege of Vicksburg. Believes Lee should have kept fighting. He burns to avenge the defeat of the Confederacy.
Michael Carmody. Katie’s younger brother. Formerly a private in the 69th New York Infantry, the “Irish Brigade.” Shot in the shoulder and hip at Fredericksburg. He received opium pills to dull the pain of his wounds as he died. But he survived.
Menelaus Castor Klissas. Greek-American stage manager, burly and brusque but occasionally kind-hearted, which he almost always regrets.
George C. Jarrett. Henry Eccleston’s partner, and the more stable of the two. A stocky, thin-lipped individual with wiry hair and hirsute ears and knuckles, careless of his dress and manner. Mechanically minded. Likes wrenches, ropes, and pulleys.
General Lucius LeClerc. A retired Union general, gruff and gregarious. Brother-in-law of George Jarrett and one of Lincoln’s favorite commanders. LeClerc is believed to be on the short list for either governor of New York or vice-president on a future Republican ticket. Fears no one but his wife, and her only when sober.
September 8, 2021
The Case for Space
Occasionally I hear someone trying to resurrect the old Either/Or. Why space? they ask. Why are American taxpayers asked to spend money on space exploration when we could be making things better at home? After all, the argument goes, with enough money, we could end poverty, eradicate the causes of world hunger, heal the injured earth. Why set our sights on darkness, when our battered blue jewel so desperately needs our help?
There was a time when the question made sense. Fifty years ago, America was locked in a dangerous and expensive battle for space supremacy with the Soviet Union. Its central competition was a race to “conquer” the barren surface of the moon, which turned out to be a little like conquering Antarctica, or the Gobi Desert. Getting there was great. We raised the flag, and dunked on the commies. But we weren’t really clear on what should come next. It took us years to figure out that the moon has resources — water, for example — that could actually be harvested. In the meantime, MLK was assassinated. Watts burned. We fought a vicious and possibly unwinnable war in Southeast Asia, the bald eagle flirted with extinction, and Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire.
Things have changed. The United States still suffers from simmering racial resentments, to be sure. But the notion of space exploration as white privilege’s pet project makes less sense in an age when Barack Obama, an avowed Star Trek fan, advocated for missions to asteroids, and his African-American NASA Administrator, Charlie Bolden, was just one of many people of color to fly on the Space Shuttle or visit the International Space Station.
And yes, the world is in big environmental trouble — bigger in fact than when we faced localized problems like smoldering rivers and LA smog. But spending on space isn’t making that problem worse. In fact, data and imagery from space have been huge factors in generating assessments of terrestrial environmental problems and interest in solving them. Even during the darkest anti-science days of the Trump Administration, NASA maintained its website warning of the dangers of climate change due to our over-use of fossil fuels. Space technology isn’t detracting from conservation efforts. It’s making the case for them. NASA continues to ring the alarm bell. Whether enough of us will act on such warnings is another issue altogether.
Most importantly, though, the reason why the whole space vs. social spending issue no longer makes sense is that space is no longer a hypothetical. We’re no longer trying to get to space. We’re in it. It’s happening now, not at some point in the future. America’s satellite-based global positioning system, perhaps the most important byproduct of our early years of space exploration, provides hundreds of millions of people with geographical and atmospheric data on a daily basis. Communications satellites enable us to talk to each other, wherever we are in the world. Private companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are on the cusp of offering “space tourism” flights similar in spirit to the rides that biplane-driving barnstormers sold to eager farm boys a hundred years ago. And if 81-year-old Wally Funk can enjoy a jaunt above the Karman line, why can’t we? (Well, cost, for one thing — but that will change.)
America’s need to continue and even increase our spending on space exploration is increasingly clear. First, we need to preserve our international lead in promoting scientific understanding of Earth, the solar system, and the universe. The prestige associated with innovations like GPS, available to everyone, and use of the Hubble Space Telescope, available to researchers all over the world, are invaluable. Despite our internecine squabbles about climate change and vaccinations, we are still seen as a country of science and technology pioneers — Jonas Salk and Neil Armstrong, Elon Musk and Gladys West. To squander this leadership position would be a huge waste of time, resources, and international good will. Influence can be exerted through the barrel of a gun. Inspiration arises more subtly — and sometimes through the lens of a telescope.
Second, space is increasingly seen as a huge, practically infinite, set of resources to be harvested, from solar energy in low-earth orbit to tritium on the moon to gold, nickel, and lithium on any number of asteroids in our solar system. The United States and Japan have already started sampling asteroids. Mining operations on the moon, Mars, and various smaller solar system objects are not a matter of if, but when. Losing out on acquisition of these resources would be a huge mistake.
And losing out is a possibility. Not only will mining in space be technologically challenging; there will also be competition. From difficult beginnings in the sixties, China has emerged as a power in space second only to the United States — and closing fast. China has started building its own space station, visited the far side of the moon, and announced plans for manned lunar and Mars missions. Japan, meanwhile, has visited two asteroids. India plans to send astronauts to the moon. The Russians and the European Space Agency are capable players in the accelerating space race, limited more by a lack of money than any want of expertise. And finally, private interests will eventually figure out ways to acquire and profit from space resources. If we want to retain any measure of supervision and control of such efforts, we need to be a spacefaring nation — and, ideally, the preeminent spacefaring nation, as Great Britain was the preeminent seafaring nation of the nineteenth century.
A final reason for maintaining competence in space gets to the heart of the Earth v. Space argument. The fact is, we need space in order to protect the Earth and humanity. We need to plan, for example, for the possible appearance of the sort of killer asteroid that slammed into the planet 65 million years ago, wiping out what were then the world’s reigning animal kings — the dinosaurs. The odds of such an event happening again are small, but less cataclysmic collisions happen on a fairly regular basis. We need to know how to prevent them. And if worse comes to worst, and Earth is no longer a viable habitat, we need to have what some call a “Plan B” for preservation of humanity itself — whether it’s a single crewed base on Mars or a robust system of off-world space stations, lunar installations, and mining operations all through the solar system.
Space remains a stunningly hostile environment. Though the search is young, we know of no other habitable planets or moons in our galaxy. Wherever we go in our solar system, we’re going to have to create our own environment. In doing so, we’ll need to contend with not only the usual human needs — oxygen, water, food, and shelter — but also with the constant threat of radiation on any celestial body that lacks the protective atmosphere possessed by Earth. And that’s just once we get there. The distances involved in traveling to celestial destinations are staggering. With current technology, even a voyage to Mars would take three months, in close quarters, with limited protection from radiation exposure. The next logical step, a trip to one of Jupiter’s apparently water-rich moons, would take more like three years, with little chance for support or rescue along the way and even less once there.
Humanity’s relationship with the cosmos might end up like our interaction with the oceans. Science fiction hasn’t always looked up at the stars. As far back as Jules Verne, it has also peered into the seas. No one is clamoring for a new Atlantis these days, and no one lives in an underwater city, though the residents of New Orleans are getting close. There are underwater hotels and restaurants, to be sure, but these are tourist magnets rather than permanent or productive habitats. Nevertheless, we traverse the oceans all the time. We take huge amounts of food and energy from the seas in ways and at scales that would have been unimaginable 500 years ago — and underwater mining, for better or, almost certainly, worse, is just getting started. Men go down to the sea in ships. They work for a period in or on this hostile environment, and then they return. Maybe this is how we will deal with space — only in much longer time frames.
Will space be like the sea, exploited but not inhabited? Or will we find some way to make it a home, at least for some portion of our species? We’re going to find out sooner than we think. It’s no longer Earth vs. Space. Low-Earth Orbit, almost unimaginable only a hundred years ago, already seems more like a part of the planet than of the great expanse beyond. And the rest of the solar system is getting closer, year by year. The choice is clear. Either America retains its lead in exploring the cosmos, or other nations will seize the torch.
There was a time when the question made sense. Fifty years ago, America was locked in a dangerous and expensive battle for space supremacy with the Soviet Union. Its central competition was a race to “conquer” the barren surface of the moon, which turned out to be a little like conquering Antarctica, or the Gobi Desert. Getting there was great. We raised the flag, and dunked on the commies. But we weren’t really clear on what should come next. It took us years to figure out that the moon has resources — water, for example — that could actually be harvested. In the meantime, MLK was assassinated. Watts burned. We fought a vicious and possibly unwinnable war in Southeast Asia, the bald eagle flirted with extinction, and Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire.
Things have changed. The United States still suffers from simmering racial resentments, to be sure. But the notion of space exploration as white privilege’s pet project makes less sense in an age when Barack Obama, an avowed Star Trek fan, advocated for missions to asteroids, and his African-American NASA Administrator, Charlie Bolden, was just one of many people of color to fly on the Space Shuttle or visit the International Space Station.
And yes, the world is in big environmental trouble — bigger in fact than when we faced localized problems like smoldering rivers and LA smog. But spending on space isn’t making that problem worse. In fact, data and imagery from space have been huge factors in generating assessments of terrestrial environmental problems and interest in solving them. Even during the darkest anti-science days of the Trump Administration, NASA maintained its website warning of the dangers of climate change due to our over-use of fossil fuels. Space technology isn’t detracting from conservation efforts. It’s making the case for them. NASA continues to ring the alarm bell. Whether enough of us will act on such warnings is another issue altogether.
Most importantly, though, the reason why the whole space vs. social spending issue no longer makes sense is that space is no longer a hypothetical. We’re no longer trying to get to space. We’re in it. It’s happening now, not at some point in the future. America’s satellite-based global positioning system, perhaps the most important byproduct of our early years of space exploration, provides hundreds of millions of people with geographical and atmospheric data on a daily basis. Communications satellites enable us to talk to each other, wherever we are in the world. Private companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are on the cusp of offering “space tourism” flights similar in spirit to the rides that biplane-driving barnstormers sold to eager farm boys a hundred years ago. And if 81-year-old Wally Funk can enjoy a jaunt above the Karman line, why can’t we? (Well, cost, for one thing — but that will change.)
America’s need to continue and even increase our spending on space exploration is increasingly clear. First, we need to preserve our international lead in promoting scientific understanding of Earth, the solar system, and the universe. The prestige associated with innovations like GPS, available to everyone, and use of the Hubble Space Telescope, available to researchers all over the world, are invaluable. Despite our internecine squabbles about climate change and vaccinations, we are still seen as a country of science and technology pioneers — Jonas Salk and Neil Armstrong, Elon Musk and Gladys West. To squander this leadership position would be a huge waste of time, resources, and international good will. Influence can be exerted through the barrel of a gun. Inspiration arises more subtly — and sometimes through the lens of a telescope.
Second, space is increasingly seen as a huge, practically infinite, set of resources to be harvested, from solar energy in low-earth orbit to tritium on the moon to gold, nickel, and lithium on any number of asteroids in our solar system. The United States and Japan have already started sampling asteroids. Mining operations on the moon, Mars, and various smaller solar system objects are not a matter of if, but when. Losing out on acquisition of these resources would be a huge mistake.
And losing out is a possibility. Not only will mining in space be technologically challenging; there will also be competition. From difficult beginnings in the sixties, China has emerged as a power in space second only to the United States — and closing fast. China has started building its own space station, visited the far side of the moon, and announced plans for manned lunar and Mars missions. Japan, meanwhile, has visited two asteroids. India plans to send astronauts to the moon. The Russians and the European Space Agency are capable players in the accelerating space race, limited more by a lack of money than any want of expertise. And finally, private interests will eventually figure out ways to acquire and profit from space resources. If we want to retain any measure of supervision and control of such efforts, we need to be a spacefaring nation — and, ideally, the preeminent spacefaring nation, as Great Britain was the preeminent seafaring nation of the nineteenth century.
A final reason for maintaining competence in space gets to the heart of the Earth v. Space argument. The fact is, we need space in order to protect the Earth and humanity. We need to plan, for example, for the possible appearance of the sort of killer asteroid that slammed into the planet 65 million years ago, wiping out what were then the world’s reigning animal kings — the dinosaurs. The odds of such an event happening again are small, but less cataclysmic collisions happen on a fairly regular basis. We need to know how to prevent them. And if worse comes to worst, and Earth is no longer a viable habitat, we need to have what some call a “Plan B” for preservation of humanity itself — whether it’s a single crewed base on Mars or a robust system of off-world space stations, lunar installations, and mining operations all through the solar system.
Space remains a stunningly hostile environment. Though the search is young, we know of no other habitable planets or moons in our galaxy. Wherever we go in our solar system, we’re going to have to create our own environment. In doing so, we’ll need to contend with not only the usual human needs — oxygen, water, food, and shelter — but also with the constant threat of radiation on any celestial body that lacks the protective atmosphere possessed by Earth. And that’s just once we get there. The distances involved in traveling to celestial destinations are staggering. With current technology, even a voyage to Mars would take three months, in close quarters, with limited protection from radiation exposure. The next logical step, a trip to one of Jupiter’s apparently water-rich moons, would take more like three years, with little chance for support or rescue along the way and even less once there.
Humanity’s relationship with the cosmos might end up like our interaction with the oceans. Science fiction hasn’t always looked up at the stars. As far back as Jules Verne, it has also peered into the seas. No one is clamoring for a new Atlantis these days, and no one lives in an underwater city, though the residents of New Orleans are getting close. There are underwater hotels and restaurants, to be sure, but these are tourist magnets rather than permanent or productive habitats. Nevertheless, we traverse the oceans all the time. We take huge amounts of food and energy from the seas in ways and at scales that would have been unimaginable 500 years ago — and underwater mining, for better or, almost certainly, worse, is just getting started. Men go down to the sea in ships. They work for a period in or on this hostile environment, and then they return. Maybe this is how we will deal with space — only in much longer time frames.
Will space be like the sea, exploited but not inhabited? Or will we find some way to make it a home, at least for some portion of our species? We’re going to find out sooner than we think. It’s no longer Earth vs. Space. Low-Earth Orbit, almost unimaginable only a hundred years ago, already seems more like a part of the planet than of the great expanse beyond. And the rest of the solar system is getting closer, year by year. The choice is clear. Either America retains its lead in exploring the cosmos, or other nations will seize the torch.
April 8, 2020
Florence Reese
Poet and songwriter Florence Reese was born on April 12, 1900 in Union County, Tennessee. Not much of a singer herself, she nevertheless wrote one of the most influential American labor songs, scribbling the words “Which Side Are You On?” immediately after having her house ransacked by anti-union thugs in Harlan County (“Bloody Harlan”), Kentucky in 1931. She combined the words with the old Celtic tune “Jack Munro” and the rest is history. “Which Side Are You On?” pretty quickly made the jump from union song to civil rights anthem. Everyone knows the Pete Seeger version, but Wikipedia claims the song has also been covered by, among others, Natalie Merchant, the Dropkick Murphys, and my personal favorite, Billy Bragg. (Here’s a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALCm5....) Sing it yourself—then go find a picket line and put yourself on it! And by the way, if you want to see Florence Reese perform her creation, check out Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning documentary “Harlan County USA.” (It’s not available on Amazon or Netflix, but you can find it here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCOd7... she appears and sings, at the age of 80, at around 49:45 in the film). Even aside from its birth in blood, the song’s evolution is a fascinating story. The tune is centuries old, and the words are ninety, but they continue to inspire us today. Happy Birthday, Florence!
March 15, 2020
Free Book!
Hey friends, I've got a book I'd like to share with you. It's Beatrice at Bay, a YA sequel to my modern fairy tale Beatrice and the Basilisk, and I'm thinking it might make a nice read for someone who's practicing "social distancing" for the next few...days? weeks? At any rate, I'd be happy to send you a copy, just email me at bmccandless3@gmail.com with your mailing address. You can find a description of the book on Amazon or Goodreads. It's a fun little novel/novella, around 26,000 words, fast and sort of funny--or as funny as a book can be when it's dealing with viruses, germs, and the end of the world. Whether you're a Beatrice fan or not, I wish you happy reading during this strange period in our national life. I've got quite a few books on my nightstand and I plan to put my stay-at-home time to good use.
February 19, 2020
Handprints on Hubble: An Astronaut's Story of Invention
Most astronaut books are about, well, astronauts. Where they came from. What their parents were like. Who they married, why they divorced, and how much they like airplanes. By contrast, Kathy Sullivan’s new book Handprints on Hubble: An Astronaut’s Story of Invention is as purposeful as she is. It’s the story of her career at NASA, of course, but it focuses consistently on the projects she was assigned to, worked on, and came to love. To subvert an old advertising phrase, it’s more about the steak than the sizzle.
Sullivan joined NASA in 1978 as part of the largest astronaut class to date, Group 8, the “Thirty-Five Fucking New Guys.” She made history as the first American woman to do an EVA—an extravehicular activity, otherwise known as a spacewalk—when she performed the feat on Shuttle mission STS-41-G in 1984. As exciting as that accomplishment was, the bulk of Handprints relates to her work on the Hubble Space Telescope, the world’s most successful orbiting astronomical observatory. Originally the plan for prolonging Hubble’s lifespan involved periodically retrieving and returning it to earth on NASA’s new “space truck,” the Shuttle, for upkeep and repairs. But somewhere along the line, as it became clear that the Shuttle was not going to be quite as frequent or as cheap a flier as envisioned, a decision was made that Hubble would need to be fully maintainable in space—i.e., while it was in orbit.
This was a revolutionary concept, and the practical problems were formidable. Think of it this way. You and your fellow taxpayers have just paid over a billion dollars to create an innovative, highly-sensitive piece of machinery that scientists all over the world hope will give humankind an unprecedented understanding of our place in the universe. If anything goes wrong, the machine will have to be fixed where it’s found—and you’re part of the team of people trying to figure out how this will happen, given that Hubble will be three hundred miles above the earth, in an environment that will kill any living thing that isn’t wearing a pressure suit, and any tool you use will go floating away into the cosmos the moment you set it down. Add to these challenges the problems inherent in working on anything that’s been designed so that lots of important parts fit in a very small space. As Sullivan has said elsewhere, working on Hubble’s Main Power Unit is a little like trying to change the spark plugs in your car while wearing two snowmobile suits, a pair of mittens, and a bucket over your head.
For the next several years, , including those bad blue days following the Challenger disaster in 1986, Sullivan and fellow astronaut Bruce McCandless II spent countless hours with engineers and technicians from NASA and aerospace contractor Lockheed Martin, planning and practicing how to make maintainability happen. A NASA engineer and native Mississippian named Jean Olivier had dreamed up an architecture for the telescope in which systems were housed in modular units around the cylindrical body of the satellite. A great start: but how, exactly, to get at and into these units? Ensuring Hubble would be fixable in orbit was literally a nuts-and-bolts project, involving unheralded but brilliant engineers and technicians like Olivier, Michael Withey, Ron Sheffield, Frank Costa, and dozens of others. (In fact, one of the first steps in the process was to figure out which bolts to use. In the end, the team settled on a double-height 7/16-inch bolt with a hexagonal head.) McCandless developed a space tool tethering system, still known as the “McTether,” that simplified and eased the ways in which astronauts could transport and use tools in space. In order to work on the telescope—to turn a wrench, for example—an astronaut would need to be able to anchor his or her feet in order to apply torque. Sullivan and McCandless worked to improve a proposed astronaut anchoring platform—it became the “Adjustable Portable Foot Restraint”—and Sullivan came up with a semi-rigid tethering system for astronaut Sherpa duties, including lugging the Adjustable Portable Foot Restraint from the Shuttle to a satellite work station. Descendants of these pieces of hardware are still used by astronauts on EVAs to this day.
The Hubble deployment mission, STS-31, left earth on April 24, 1990. Deployment was problematic. Astronaut Steve Hawley had trouble plucking Hubble from Discovery’s payload bay with the spacecraft’s robotic arm and lifting it “above” the shuttle, where ground control could activate it. Then, once this act of positioning was achieved, one of the satellite’s two solar arrays failed to deploy. The arrays are sheets of solar cells that collect energy to power the satellite’s operations. A major innovation in Hubble’s design was to attach the cells to a flexible “sheet” that could be rolled and unrolled around a central drum, like a window blind. As clever as the concept was, it didn’t work as planned. As time wore on and the problem persisted, Sullivan and crewmate McCandless were instructed to suit up for an EVA to manually deploy the errant array. They started the process of breathing pure oxygen to purge the nitrogen from their bloodstream, standard procedure for any spacewalker entering the vacuum of space. After several attempts at troubleshooting, however, engineers on the ground finally figured out that a faulty tension monitoring module was preventing the roll-out of the balky solar array. Once this was fixed, Sullivan and McCandless received orders to stand down. Ironically, the Hubble was deployed while they were still in the payload bay, pressure suited and waiting to begin their repair mission. They missed the activation of the satellite they’d both worked so hard to bring to life.
Hubble’s deployment seemed to represent a triumph for NASA, but the good feelings were short-lived. The telescope’s main mirror had been manufactured incorrectly, and was sending back scientifically valuable but decidedly sub-optimal images from space. It wasn’t that the mirror was flawed. It was perfectly ground—but ground to slightly wrong specifications. Once the defect was made public, the American press howled with derision. Hubble quickly went from being a symbol of success to the embodiment of technological (and financial) folly. But here’s where NASA’s “maintainability” work proved its worth. Hubble could be fixed. In 1993 a Shuttle crew led by Story Musgrave installed additional small mirrors to correct the main mirror’s faulty vision. As a result of this and several other servicing missions—Hubble was, indeed, fully maintainable in space—over the years, the apparatus continues to function even today. It flies 340 miles above the earth’s surface and orbits the planet fifteen times a day. It has captured stunning snapshots of galaxies previously undreamt of, and allowed us new insights into the nature of the universe and how we got here—and, maybe more importantly, where we’re going.
Among the discoveries and confirmations Hubble has facilitated are the surprising—and somewhat alarming—fact that the universe is not only expanding, but in fact expanding at increased velocity; that the universe is around 13.7 billion years old; that black holes do in fact exist, as astronomers and physicists had previously postulated, and may in fact be at the heart of most if not all galaxies; that Pluto has a fifth moon; and that orbiting the sun even beyond Pluto is a giant, potato-shaped rock that astronomers have dubbed Ultima Thule, after the Romans’ name for the mist-shrouded, most distant land in the ancient world.
Hubble allowed astronomers to watch Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9’s kamikaze crash into Jupiter and has detected what seems to be a massive saltwater ocean under the ice of Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede. It has also found what star-watchers believe to be the most distant galaxy ever observed, the mysterious GN-z11, located some 32 billion light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. One source reports that over 15,000 scientific papers have included data from Hubble. Almost as important as the science is the beauty. Data counts, but so do diamonds. The images Hubble has sent back to earth astonish even jaded sky watchers, much less those of us who wouldn’t know dark matter from Darth Vader. We goggle at sights like the odd, hourglass-shaped Southern Crab Nebula, several thousand light years away; and the shimmering pillars of the Star Queen Nebula, extended like fingers on the hand of God; the teeming galactic petri dish of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, every one of its points of light a million possible and impossible worlds. The size, shape, and sheer spectral weirdness of the images Hubble relays to us boggle the imagination, and make prophets and dreamers of us all.
While Sullivan has called space flight a “magical, crazy, indescribable experience,” Handprints on Hubble leaves little room for reverie. Sullivan is notably reticent about her personal life and feelings. That’s her prerogative, of course, and has no bearing on the science and engineering discussed in the book. Frankly, some other astronaut accounts have offered a little too much personality. Still, it would be nice to know more about Sullivan as a person, outside the space suit and the neutral buoyancy tank at JSC. What does she read? Who does she love? This quibble aside, Handprints is a valuable, absorbing account of men and women—women and men?—inventing the sorts of real-life solutions to scientific challenges that have allowed us to significantly advance our understanding of the cosmos. If you’re interested in the American space program, and space astronomy in particular, do whatever you have to do to get your handprints on Sullivan’s book.
Sullivan joined NASA in 1978 as part of the largest astronaut class to date, Group 8, the “Thirty-Five Fucking New Guys.” She made history as the first American woman to do an EVA—an extravehicular activity, otherwise known as a spacewalk—when she performed the feat on Shuttle mission STS-41-G in 1984. As exciting as that accomplishment was, the bulk of Handprints relates to her work on the Hubble Space Telescope, the world’s most successful orbiting astronomical observatory. Originally the plan for prolonging Hubble’s lifespan involved periodically retrieving and returning it to earth on NASA’s new “space truck,” the Shuttle, for upkeep and repairs. But somewhere along the line, as it became clear that the Shuttle was not going to be quite as frequent or as cheap a flier as envisioned, a decision was made that Hubble would need to be fully maintainable in space—i.e., while it was in orbit.
This was a revolutionary concept, and the practical problems were formidable. Think of it this way. You and your fellow taxpayers have just paid over a billion dollars to create an innovative, highly-sensitive piece of machinery that scientists all over the world hope will give humankind an unprecedented understanding of our place in the universe. If anything goes wrong, the machine will have to be fixed where it’s found—and you’re part of the team of people trying to figure out how this will happen, given that Hubble will be three hundred miles above the earth, in an environment that will kill any living thing that isn’t wearing a pressure suit, and any tool you use will go floating away into the cosmos the moment you set it down. Add to these challenges the problems inherent in working on anything that’s been designed so that lots of important parts fit in a very small space. As Sullivan has said elsewhere, working on Hubble’s Main Power Unit is a little like trying to change the spark plugs in your car while wearing two snowmobile suits, a pair of mittens, and a bucket over your head.
For the next several years, , including those bad blue days following the Challenger disaster in 1986, Sullivan and fellow astronaut Bruce McCandless II spent countless hours with engineers and technicians from NASA and aerospace contractor Lockheed Martin, planning and practicing how to make maintainability happen. A NASA engineer and native Mississippian named Jean Olivier had dreamed up an architecture for the telescope in which systems were housed in modular units around the cylindrical body of the satellite. A great start: but how, exactly, to get at and into these units? Ensuring Hubble would be fixable in orbit was literally a nuts-and-bolts project, involving unheralded but brilliant engineers and technicians like Olivier, Michael Withey, Ron Sheffield, Frank Costa, and dozens of others. (In fact, one of the first steps in the process was to figure out which bolts to use. In the end, the team settled on a double-height 7/16-inch bolt with a hexagonal head.) McCandless developed a space tool tethering system, still known as the “McTether,” that simplified and eased the ways in which astronauts could transport and use tools in space. In order to work on the telescope—to turn a wrench, for example—an astronaut would need to be able to anchor his or her feet in order to apply torque. Sullivan and McCandless worked to improve a proposed astronaut anchoring platform—it became the “Adjustable Portable Foot Restraint”—and Sullivan came up with a semi-rigid tethering system for astronaut Sherpa duties, including lugging the Adjustable Portable Foot Restraint from the Shuttle to a satellite work station. Descendants of these pieces of hardware are still used by astronauts on EVAs to this day.
The Hubble deployment mission, STS-31, left earth on April 24, 1990. Deployment was problematic. Astronaut Steve Hawley had trouble plucking Hubble from Discovery’s payload bay with the spacecraft’s robotic arm and lifting it “above” the shuttle, where ground control could activate it. Then, once this act of positioning was achieved, one of the satellite’s two solar arrays failed to deploy. The arrays are sheets of solar cells that collect energy to power the satellite’s operations. A major innovation in Hubble’s design was to attach the cells to a flexible “sheet” that could be rolled and unrolled around a central drum, like a window blind. As clever as the concept was, it didn’t work as planned. As time wore on and the problem persisted, Sullivan and crewmate McCandless were instructed to suit up for an EVA to manually deploy the errant array. They started the process of breathing pure oxygen to purge the nitrogen from their bloodstream, standard procedure for any spacewalker entering the vacuum of space. After several attempts at troubleshooting, however, engineers on the ground finally figured out that a faulty tension monitoring module was preventing the roll-out of the balky solar array. Once this was fixed, Sullivan and McCandless received orders to stand down. Ironically, the Hubble was deployed while they were still in the payload bay, pressure suited and waiting to begin their repair mission. They missed the activation of the satellite they’d both worked so hard to bring to life.
Hubble’s deployment seemed to represent a triumph for NASA, but the good feelings were short-lived. The telescope’s main mirror had been manufactured incorrectly, and was sending back scientifically valuable but decidedly sub-optimal images from space. It wasn’t that the mirror was flawed. It was perfectly ground—but ground to slightly wrong specifications. Once the defect was made public, the American press howled with derision. Hubble quickly went from being a symbol of success to the embodiment of technological (and financial) folly. But here’s where NASA’s “maintainability” work proved its worth. Hubble could be fixed. In 1993 a Shuttle crew led by Story Musgrave installed additional small mirrors to correct the main mirror’s faulty vision. As a result of this and several other servicing missions—Hubble was, indeed, fully maintainable in space—over the years, the apparatus continues to function even today. It flies 340 miles above the earth’s surface and orbits the planet fifteen times a day. It has captured stunning snapshots of galaxies previously undreamt of, and allowed us new insights into the nature of the universe and how we got here—and, maybe more importantly, where we’re going.
Among the discoveries and confirmations Hubble has facilitated are the surprising—and somewhat alarming—fact that the universe is not only expanding, but in fact expanding at increased velocity; that the universe is around 13.7 billion years old; that black holes do in fact exist, as astronomers and physicists had previously postulated, and may in fact be at the heart of most if not all galaxies; that Pluto has a fifth moon; and that orbiting the sun even beyond Pluto is a giant, potato-shaped rock that astronomers have dubbed Ultima Thule, after the Romans’ name for the mist-shrouded, most distant land in the ancient world.
Hubble allowed astronomers to watch Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9’s kamikaze crash into Jupiter and has detected what seems to be a massive saltwater ocean under the ice of Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede. It has also found what star-watchers believe to be the most distant galaxy ever observed, the mysterious GN-z11, located some 32 billion light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. One source reports that over 15,000 scientific papers have included data from Hubble. Almost as important as the science is the beauty. Data counts, but so do diamonds. The images Hubble has sent back to earth astonish even jaded sky watchers, much less those of us who wouldn’t know dark matter from Darth Vader. We goggle at sights like the odd, hourglass-shaped Southern Crab Nebula, several thousand light years away; and the shimmering pillars of the Star Queen Nebula, extended like fingers on the hand of God; the teeming galactic petri dish of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, every one of its points of light a million possible and impossible worlds. The size, shape, and sheer spectral weirdness of the images Hubble relays to us boggle the imagination, and make prophets and dreamers of us all.
While Sullivan has called space flight a “magical, crazy, indescribable experience,” Handprints on Hubble leaves little room for reverie. Sullivan is notably reticent about her personal life and feelings. That’s her prerogative, of course, and has no bearing on the science and engineering discussed in the book. Frankly, some other astronaut accounts have offered a little too much personality. Still, it would be nice to know more about Sullivan as a person, outside the space suit and the neutral buoyancy tank at JSC. What does she read? Who does she love? This quibble aside, Handprints is a valuable, absorbing account of men and women—women and men?—inventing the sorts of real-life solutions to scientific challenges that have allowed us to significantly advance our understanding of the cosmos. If you’re interested in the American space program, and space astronomy in particular, do whatever you have to do to get your handprints on Sullivan’s book.
February 5, 2020
An Iconic Spaceflight
Shuttle mission STS-41-B blasted off from Cape Kennedy on February 3, 1984 with a crew of five astronauts. Fittingly, in the age of Ronald Reagan and renewed cold war, it was a photogenic crew—the Right Stuff, with sideburns. Commander Vance Brand was fifty-three, a blonde, easygoing Coloradan and Navy test pilot who’d flown previously on the Apollo-Soyuz mission and barely survived inhaling hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide fumes upon re-entry. Pilot Robert L. “Hoot” Gibson was a Naval Academy graduate and one of the best fliers NASA ever employed. An improbably handsome individual with a lush mustache, he lent a Tom Cruisian flair to the mission; he later married one of the space program’s most charismatic female astronauts, Dr. Rhea Seddon, and he was still winning airplane races at the age of 73. Mission Specialist Captain Bruce McCandless II was a former Navy fighter pilot and Stanford-educated electical engineer, a man who built computers in his spare time for fun. Army captain Bob Stewart was an unassuming former helicopter pilot who helped develop and test the Sikorsky Black Hawk assault helicopter; not long after the mission, he was promoted to Brigadier General. And Mission Specialist Dr. Ron McNair was an M.I.T.-trained astrophysicist, a black belt in karate, and an accomplished saxophone player. STS-41-B’s principal objective: to test the Manned Maneuvering Unit, the futuristic jet pack that would allow astronauts to maneuver in space untethered to their spacecraft. That test was scheduled for February 7, 1984. Buck Rogers was about to fly.
February 4, 2020
Remembering the Fallen Astronauts
I have been away from my computer for the past three days, but I don’t want to fail to mention that this past week was the anniversary of all three of the most calamitous events to befall the American space program, with fatal accidents occurring in connection with the following spacecraft: Apollo 1 (January 27, 1967); the shuttle orbiter Challenger (January 28, 1986); and the shuttle orbiter Columbia (February 1, 2003). I remember where I was when I heard about or saw each of these incidents, which resulted in the loss of a total of seventeen good men and women. The best that can be said about these sad days is that they may have helped us understand how to avoid similar accidents in the future. Space is hard, and the people who visit it are more or less always in peril. Let’s not forget that—or them.
September 26, 2019
Remembering The Grundoon
Found a copy of my first novel, The Grundoon, this afternoon, and couldn't help myself: I read a few pages. But hey, it wasn't too bad! Here's a passage about the protagonist's relationship with his little sister:
Radkey could still remember how his mother wept when she learned that Sarah had been sentenced to the Friendswood Special Assignments Center, a notorious warehouse for the school district’s behavioral head lice. This was the perennial home-away-from-home of such problematic individuals as Martin Wepner, who liked to set fires in trash cans, and Vince Vardello, who’d tried to slash the throat of his art teacher with the sharpened edge of a Pontiac Firebird medallion when she turned down his second proposal of marriage. Sarah was fifteen. She seemed unconcerned by her new surroundings, though she admitted the bus ride was going to be a little creepier. Why are you crying? she asked her mother. I’m the one they think is a freak! Radkey figured his mother cried because she couldn’t understand what her daughter was thinking, couldn’t understand and therefore couldn’t help. Nothing ever made sense with Sarah. And so the family tried another school, a private school, but there were problems there as well, including angry letters from other parents in connection with an incident involving the distribution of psilocybin mushrooms, and then it was back to Friendswood High but that didn’t last long either, though the story line grew murky at this point.
Sarah had always been contrary. By the time Radkey left for college, she was gulping ecstasy and maybe selling it as well, sleeping out on the beach at Galveston with her friends and missing school for two and three days at a stretch. She laughed at him when he tried to lecture her—but only at the first few sentences he spoke. He’d talk to her in his softest superpower voice, like the U.S. addressing a fractious African republic. He’d urge her to get some school spirit. You know. Try out for the drill team. Or join the History Club, which he happened to know for a fact had no actual admission standards and no reason for existence other than to visit the San Jacinto Monument every April with Miss Card, spinster descendant of one of those mutton-chopped heroes of Texas independence, and moreover to allow certain individuals (him, for example! And why not her?) to list yet another extracurricular activity on their resumes for the benefit of some anonymous college application screener. But what made perfect sense to Radkey only got on his sister’s last nerve. She’d be thoroughly pissed off by the time he offered to write a recommendation for her. Sometimes she’d scream and say she hated him. Sometimes he said it back. She turned seventeen only two weeks before the evening in October when she slid off Hardy Road in her father’s car, wrapping the Volvo around a cement pillar beneath a highway overpass and losing the front of her skull to the windshield. Hardy Road lay on the east side of Houston, in a neighborhood of used car lots and cinder-block cervecerias. No one even knew what she was doing there. Given his parents’ sharp sense of propriety, Radkey figured no one had ever asked. He turned out to be wrong about this, though in the end it hardly mattered.
Radkey could still remember how his mother wept when she learned that Sarah had been sentenced to the Friendswood Special Assignments Center, a notorious warehouse for the school district’s behavioral head lice. This was the perennial home-away-from-home of such problematic individuals as Martin Wepner, who liked to set fires in trash cans, and Vince Vardello, who’d tried to slash the throat of his art teacher with the sharpened edge of a Pontiac Firebird medallion when she turned down his second proposal of marriage. Sarah was fifteen. She seemed unconcerned by her new surroundings, though she admitted the bus ride was going to be a little creepier. Why are you crying? she asked her mother. I’m the one they think is a freak! Radkey figured his mother cried because she couldn’t understand what her daughter was thinking, couldn’t understand and therefore couldn’t help. Nothing ever made sense with Sarah. And so the family tried another school, a private school, but there were problems there as well, including angry letters from other parents in connection with an incident involving the distribution of psilocybin mushrooms, and then it was back to Friendswood High but that didn’t last long either, though the story line grew murky at this point.
Sarah had always been contrary. By the time Radkey left for college, she was gulping ecstasy and maybe selling it as well, sleeping out on the beach at Galveston with her friends and missing school for two and three days at a stretch. She laughed at him when he tried to lecture her—but only at the first few sentences he spoke. He’d talk to her in his softest superpower voice, like the U.S. addressing a fractious African republic. He’d urge her to get some school spirit. You know. Try out for the drill team. Or join the History Club, which he happened to know for a fact had no actual admission standards and no reason for existence other than to visit the San Jacinto Monument every April with Miss Card, spinster descendant of one of those mutton-chopped heroes of Texas independence, and moreover to allow certain individuals (him, for example! And why not her?) to list yet another extracurricular activity on their resumes for the benefit of some anonymous college application screener. But what made perfect sense to Radkey only got on his sister’s last nerve. She’d be thoroughly pissed off by the time he offered to write a recommendation for her. Sometimes she’d scream and say she hated him. Sometimes he said it back. She turned seventeen only two weeks before the evening in October when she slid off Hardy Road in her father’s car, wrapping the Volvo around a cement pillar beneath a highway overpass and losing the front of her skull to the windshield. Hardy Road lay on the east side of Houston, in a neighborhood of used car lots and cinder-block cervecerias. No one even knew what she was doing there. Given his parents’ sharp sense of propriety, Radkey figured no one had ever asked. He turned out to be wrong about this, though in the end it hardly mattered.
September 25, 2019
Annihilation (Book Review)
This is a tough one for me. I liked it but was a little frustrated by the final twenty pages or so. I'm pretty sure I have no idea what happened in the book, but I'm not too bothered by that fact, since our narrator clearly doesn't know either and I'm not sure she would tell us if she did. Having said that, Annihilation is genuinely unsettling, especially the first third, and it's pretty hard to creep me out. Well done throughout, don't get me wrong, I just wish I'd had a better sense of where I was headed...or being led to.
September 19, 2019
Dreamland (Book Review)
Opiate crisis? I confess I was only vaguely aware of the dimensions of this public health catastrophe before I started this book. Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic does a great job of laying the whole thing out, with not only numbers but also names and faces brought forward to show the cost, and a whole cast of actors and attitudes named as contributors to the crisis. Author Sam Quinones’s thesis is that American medicine’s approach to opiate prescription began to evolve just as, and in many cases helped along by, the pharmaceutical industry’s enthusiastic marketing of time-released opiate products—specifically, Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin. Purdue’s sales pitch was based on flimsy and incomplete scientific evidence purporting to show that OxyContin was not addictive, which was at best misleading and at worst a flat-out lie. In fact the drug managed to addict thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of Americans. In the face of this massive marketing push, even responsible doctors began to lean on opiates to solve pain problems that required far more extensive, and more nuanced, treatment. The worst physicians flat-out operated as drug dealers, prescribing millions of pills through “pill mill” operations that were especially effective in depressed Rust Belt states like Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. When OxyContin became too expensive, addicts turned to a new and distinctive drug to take its place: black-tar heroin from a tiny Mexican state called Nayarit on the country’s west coast. Drug dealing cells from in and around Xalisco infiltrated small and mid-sized American cities affected by the OxyContin craze and fueled a secondary wave of heroin addiction. The result was thousands of overdoses, many fatal, and public health costs that will probably never be fully reckoned. Oh, yes, and grief. Oceans of it. Author Sam Quinones does a good job of introducing members of the families who have lost loved ones to opiates, legal, illegal, or in combination, and helping us understand the strangely “normal” face of addiction. There’s much more to the book than my little sketch can cover, including some hard thinking about the corrosive effects of quick-profit capitalism and the scourge of outsourcing U.S. industry. Quinones also speculates that recent attempts to liberalize punishment for drug possession offenses has been fueled by the fact that most victims of the opiate crisis have been white and suburban—that, in effect, the victims look a lot like the men and women in our state legislatures. This isn’t a perfect book. The narrative tends to circle rather than advance, and there’s one (or two) too many references to the pizza delivery-like business model of the Nayarit dealers. Still, the details are worth getting, even if we get them more once. The problems described in Dreamland continue, of course, and the opiates of choice (the Houston Cocktail, for example) are different in other parts of the country. The book makes clear there are no easy fixes. If you want to know where at least some of the problems came from, though, Dreamland is a good place to start.
From Here to Infirmity
Thoughts, drafts, reviews, and opinions from Bruce McCandless, poet, amateur historian, bicyclist and attorney. I'm partial to Beowulf, Dylan, Cormac McCarthy, Leonard Cohen, Walt Whitman, Hillary Man
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