what if? by Randall Munroe

Randall Munroe is the author of one of my favorite web comics, xkcd, and so I was excited when what if? was chosen for our book club. And for good reason: this is the funniest book I've read in ages. I read it while traveling recently and my wife kept looking at me oddly when I'd literally laugh out loud! The concept here is that Munroe gives "serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions," heavily laced with his trademark humor and cartoons. "Absurd" is certainly an appropriate word, with the book including questions such as "From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?" "How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live?" and "What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place?" The author then examines the questions with a scientific bent, albeit often ridiculous as immortal people and bullets with the density of a neutron star are theoretical at best.

It is hard to pick my favorite vignette; they were all fantastic. "Periodic Wall of the Elements" discusses the possibility of building a periodic table where each block is actually made of the respective element. "The sixth row would explode violently, destroying the building in a cloud of radioactive, poisonous fire and dust. Do not build the seventh row." "Relativistic Baseball" examines a baseball being pitched at 90% of the speed of light, ending with "everything within roughly a mile of the park would be leveled, and a firestorm would engulf the surrounding city. Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered “hit by pitch” and would be eligible to advance to first base." And "Machine-Gun Jetpack" has possibly my favorite cartoon (included here) with the caption "Actually, what I'm confused about is how."

On top of the humor inherent in the questions and answer themselves, there is a constant stream of comedy throughout the narrative as well. Pop-culture references abound, with Gremlins, Furbies, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dragon Ball Z, and Firefly making common appearances. At one point Munroe gets int an argument with himself in the footnotes about the proper capitalization and attribution of "Lego." And one of my favorite running gags was the use of [citation needed] for patently obvious items: "After all, the Empire State Building sits on a base like that, and it's more than a few days old^{[citation needed]} and hasn't disappeared into the ground.^{[citation needed]}" Even the book jacket was funny, with the flip-side showing a map of "the world after a portal to Mars opened at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, draining most of the oceans."

I can't say enough good things about this book. Funny and educational; everyone in my book club liked it, as did both of my sons. Munroe gathers these questions from his website, so hopefully a sequel is in the cards!

First Sentence:

Q. What would happen if the Earth ad all terrestrial objects suddenly stopped spinning, but the atmosphere retained its velocity?

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe

I'm a huge fan of the movie The Right Stuffbut admit I've never actually read the book before now. As expected, the two have a lot in common, although Wolfe spends a lot more time describing the one-sided antagonism between the astronauts and classic pilots than the film does. A common theme was how the press made it sound like the Mercury astronauts were the first people to ever ride a rocket, but "Yeager had done precisely that more than forty times. Fifteen other pilots had done it also, and they had reached speeds greater than three times the speed of sound and an altitude of 126,000 feet." The jet test pilots believed they belonged at the top of the aircraft food chain, because after all the astronauts were intended to be mere passengers. "There was very little action that an astronaut could take in a Mercury capsule, other than to abort the flight and save his own life. So he was not being trained to fly the capsule. He was being trained to ride in it." The public disagreed, however, and the first group of astronauts were instant heroes long before ever getting near a rocket. "All seven, collectively, emerged in a golden haze as the seven finest pilots and bravest men in the United States. A blazing aura was upon them all." Ironically, Tom Wolfe wrote about the self-aggrandizement of both the pilots and astronauts, but the only picture in the book is of the author and Wolfe's name on the cover is three times as large as the title.

First Sentence:

Within five minutes, or ten minutes, no more than that, three of the others had called her on the telephone to ask her if she had heard that something had happened out there.

Sex on the Moon, by Ben Mezrich

In 2002, Thad Roberts stole of some of the most rare and valuable items anywhere: moon rocks. Told in Mezrich's fictional non-fiction style, this is an entertaining romp telling how a brilliant kid with the world at his feet ended up in prison. Roberts is a fascinating person; raised in a strict Mormon household, when going on his mission trip he and his companions all told each other they'd already had sex. Roberts went one step further, though, and as he had been taught, confessed to his mission president. Instead of absolution, he was abruptly thrown out of the mission and the church, and after being returned home thrown out of his family as well. At nineteen years old, he was on his own with no support structure. From this inauspicious beginning, he reinvented himself as a scholar (majoring in geology, astronomy, and physics at the University of Utah) and an adrenalin junkie (becoming a pilot and a certified scuba instructor, and bicycling across the country), and eventually accepted into one of the most prestigious student programs in the country at NASA.

Why would such a confident and successful person commit such a public crime? The difficulty of the problem appealed to his intellectual side and the audacity of the act appealed to his daredevil side, but that is simply what made the act successful. What set Roberts off was when a scientist referred to the rocks as trash because they'd been outside of controlled environments and thus contaminated. Being a boy who had been disposed of by his religion and his family for being worthless, Roberts has a unique view on finding value where others do not; this view of the world is what led him to collect things he saw as unwanted. At Utah he stole "trash" fossils from the geology department for the same reason.

Doing a bit of research shows that Mezrich amalgamated several characters and there is a lot of dialog that couldn't possibly be authentic, explaining why this often reads more like a screenplay than a research paper. The gist of the story is accurate, though, and I learned quite a bit about a unique pop culture event—the theft of extraterrestrial material. While Sex on the Moon may be more "based on a true story" than "narrative nonfiction" it is still highly entertaining.

First Sentence:

There was something vaguely menacing about the folders.

Riding Rockets, by Mike Mullane

Mike Mullane was one of the first space shuttle astronauts, completing three space missions aboard the shuttles Discovery and Atlantis and recording over 350 hours in outer space. His biography is a fascinating look at NASA and the shuttle program, covering selection and training, jealousy and euphoria, and dealing with disaster. He has a great writing style: sometimes funny, sometimes honest, but always hitting just the right note for the story. And what stories! Bathroom humor about colon exams and condom fittings, emotional treatises about the helplessness experienced when strapped into a rocket before takeoff and the frustration of a scratched launch, and poignant tales about fulfilling a life-long dream. The most touching descriptions, however, are about the Challenger disaster.

The shuttle explosion is a tragedy seared into our national consciousness, but for most of us the astronauts who died that day are simply names on a monument. For Mullane it was entirely too personal—he lost friends and coworkers that day. And for Mullane’s family and the families of all the other NASA astronauts, it was the realization of their worst fears. The author doesn’t write just about the sadness, though; his anger at the NASA repeated administrative failures that caused the accident comes through loud and clear. “But as the notes of ‘Taps’ floated in the air I was stirred anew in my anger at NASA management. This should have never happened. It was completely preventable. There had been four years of warnings.” Sadly, any lessons learned were temporary at best; seventeen years later it happened again with Columbia.

More than just a memoir, Riding Rockets is also the story of the shuttle program at NASA. Mullane explains how the selection process worked to become an astronaut, and how frustratingly opaque the selection process for missions was. He doesn’t pull many punches; sexism and misogynist behavior was unbelievably rampant, and the level of jealousy between those chosen for space and those left behind on each mission was shocking. Most surprising was the political infighting between the astronauts that came from the Air Force and those from post-doc educations, and the shared disgust for the “part-time astronauts,” those people added to missions that “hadn’t paid the dues to get there—a lifetime of brutal work and fierce competition.”

Funny and forthright, emotional and educational, poignant and pointed. I utterly enjoyed Riding Rockets and unhesitatingly recommend this biography to anyone.

First Sentence:

I was naked, lying on my side on a table in the NASA Flight Medicine Clinic bathroom, probing at mt rear end with the nozzle of an enema.