Agent Palmer

Amy Shira Teitel’s Fighting for Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight features two characters who, while separated by 25 years in age, both lead the way for Sally Ride, but it wasn’t a smooth flight.

It’s compelling in the most dramatic of ways, and not just because the space program NASA had at the start consisted of “a bunch of rockets with a tendency to explode.” And despite a rallying cry of wanting the first woman in space to be American, it was Valentina Tereshkova from the Soviet Union who got there first.

Val Kilmer is one of those actors. How you know him is most often related to either the first movie you saw him in or your favorite film of his. Is he your top secret agent? Your Real Genius? Your Iceman? Your Madmartigan? Your Batman? Your Lizard King? Your Bank Robber? Your Saint? Or your Huckleberry?

Well, no matter what he is to you, he’s an artist and his memoir is a thing of poetry written in prose. There is much more to Val Kilmer than the roles he has played, but the stories that he writes about…

When you read as much on the subject of early NASA even back to the Space Task Group, predecessor to NASA, there are a few names that always come up, and one of them is Chris Kraft.

He was basically the father of what would become Mission Control as we know it today, and in his autobiography Flight: My Life in Mission Control, the first NASA Flight Director, known simply as Flight, holds no punches.

It’s possible there exist plenty of places on the internet where you can read about the historical inaccuracies and inconsistencies in The Right Stuff. This is not really that place. I chose to overlook that and focus on one very important thing they got right. It is an inspiring story of the early tribulations of America’s space program, and to this day, it’s still an inspiring watch.

I have not yet read Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff on which the film was based, though it is making its way to the top of my list.

Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones is, like it’s eponymous subject, a beacon for all times and all people. The things Jim Henson created, the things he inspired, and the way he lived his life are all examples that there can be good in the world, and we don’t just have to receive it, we can enjoy it, share it, collaborate on it, and create it ourselves.

The story of Jim Henson is the story of an innovator who was never satisfied unless he was on to the next thing, and then the next, and the next, and the next.