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...