V's Reads

Similar to the movie Hidden Figures , but going back to earlier decades, this book tells the story of the women who served as human computers to send the first satellites into space and plot the trajectories of various spacecraft by hand. A student of Caltech and his buddies who liked to experiment with rockets, known as the Suicide Squad, gained some funding and eventually the more dignified name of JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), along with a full staff of engineers and an all-female team of computers. For a while they stayed in business by serving the needs of the military, but their interest all along was space exploration, not weapons, and when NASA was created they were absorbed into it and were ultimately able to focus on their real dream. JPL was a unique opportunity for women who were accomplished mathematicians to put their skills to employable use, since their gender automatically excluded them from consideration for engineer positions. It's pretty crazy to read about ...

This book chronicles how John and his wife, Traca, decided to pause their life in Maine, rent out their house, quit their jobs and spend half a year volunteering around the world with their 2 teenage kids. They picked up and moved to Portugal for a year when their children were small, and Traca is a yogi and rather a free spirit, so it wasn't necessarily a wildly out-of-character decision for them, but it definitely took determination and some blind faith to get out the door. Their travels took them to a wildlife sanctuary on Costa Rica's Osa peninsula, a farm in New Zealand, an English teaching assignment in Thailand, an orphanage in India, and a Tibetan school in Ladakh (also India). One of the most powerful aspects of the book was the way it illustrated some of the many ways people all over the globe live lives of meaning and contentment with little to no material wealth. This excerpt about the village of Stok, India, is an example: ...Most people were farmers; they tende...

I've actually found a few cool book recommendations on Pinterest and this was one of them. Being obsessed with all things Sherlock, I skimmed through it at the library and it's one of those books that already had me interested by the first sentence- always a good sign! It's the true tale of Grace Humiston, a New York detective and lawyer in the early 1900s. She was the first female US District Attorney and spent most of her career providing cheap legal help to low-income immigrants (her motto was "Justice for those of limited means") and taking on cases dealing with white slavery. The majority of the book, however, focuses on Ruth Cruger, an 18 year old girl who went missing, whose case the police completely (and probably intentionally) bungled, and how Humiston eventually unraveled the mystery. She was doing all this before women could even vote, and she did her work not only in the midst of a generally sexist climate but also threats to her life and livelihood...

The Nasty Bits is a collection of articles Bourdain wrote for various publications and it covers a huge variety of countries and topics. On one assignment, he spent 5 days on a giant boat that's kind of a luxury bunch of floating condos for multi-millionaires. You can buy an apartment on it and drop in whenever you feel like it, get off wherever you feel like it, and it makes stops at swanky events around the world- Cannes film festival and the like. You've got tennis courts, putting greens, a library, and more. An incredibly bizarre thing I never knew existed. My favorite articles were the one recounting a trip to Greece where pretty much everything went wrong and he found himself in a cliff jumping situation with an annoying host...it was just so hilariously written...and The Evildoers, where he talks about his favorite fast food from other countries (tapas, pho, tacos, etc.) and how America has unfortunately got it so wrong in this area. ...is fast food inherently evil? ...

I read Kitchen Confidential so long ago that I don't remember much about it anymore, other than my impression that Anthony Bourdain was more of an artist on TV than in writing. But I'm glad I gave his books another chance, because I read two in 2018 and LOVED them. Maybe he got better, or maybe I just got older and better able to appreciate his perspective. For someone who at first glance seems like he could be an opinionated asshole, he's actually quick to own up to his own faults and prejudices and I find his complete honesty so incredibly refreshing. He's also hilarious. On the flip side, there was a chapter focused on a trip to Vietnam where he runs into a Vietnamese man on the street who has been disfigured by napalm. He feels overcome with guilt and self-loathing for being American, being a happy tourist traipsing around eating noodles in a place where so many horrors took place between our cultures, etc. and spends a bunch of the time they were supposed to be fil...