What Im reading on my birthday: IF THE SUN DIES by Oriana Fallaci, To write that Oriana Fallaci is a passionate woman is putting it too mildly. She appears as a fiery independent spirit, unhesitatingly taking an ax to this world’s evildoers. As a young girl she joined her father in the Italian underground’s fight against the Nazis and Fascists. She continues this fight with her pen, typewriter, and word processor. Even now, while stricken with cancer, she refuses to let a little thing like that stop her from defending Western Civilization against those Islamists who would murder it, or those Westerners who would let it happen. For her, the great questions are: where are we going, and why? What kind of heroes will it take to get us there? So why did this woman in 1964 fly to America to write about the space program? She was not much interested in the technical details, though she does write amusingly about her encounters with a centrifuge and her visit to San Antonio’s School of Aerospace Medicine. She mischievously laid out plans with a couple of NASA employees from the Cape to fly to the Moon to steal all the cheese (Project Cheese). In Houston she carefully noted the effect a young male scientist has on a lingerie model during a lunchtime fashion show. Sometimes she comes off as a mythical sprite who passes through men’s lives leaving chaos and laughter behind, but that is not her main motive for writing this book. For her, the great questions are: where are we going, and why? What kind of heroes will it take to get us there? These questions form the core of this book. Written as a series of missives to her beloved father, who dislikes the whole endeavor, she tries to get astronauts like Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard to expose their innermost selves. She discovers that Slayton flew bombing missions against her hometown of Florence during the war, and may even have dropped the bombs that injured her. Shepard seems more interested in selling her a cow or horse from his ranch than in submitting himself to an analysis of his feelings and ambitions. Best of all is her encounter with Pete Conrad, she asks him to “…say anything you like. Except one thing: that you’ve dreamed of flying ever since you were a child. I’ve already heard that from six or seven of them. If you say it too, I’ll open that window and jump out.” He bounded like a cat, and flung open the window: “Jump.” She finally met an astronaut who matched her own wicked, witty sense of humor.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 14:08:21 +0000
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