Paper Girl by Beth Macy

Paper Girl by Beth Macy is a good book subtitled A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America. Macys grew up in Urbana, Ohio, graduating in 1982 from Urbana High School. There was a healthy economy, thriving schools, and middle class, that Macys, one of the poorer kids in her class, could aspire to. 

A Pell Grant, spearheaded by Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, enabled Macys to attend college. She graduated from Bowling Green State University in 1986, the tail end of the time a Pell Grant would cover tuition, housing, and books for a poor kid. Now the average Pell grant pays less than 30% of a public university education, an amount that could well have shut out Macys, who later was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, from college. The gutting of Pell Grants began under Ronald Reagan and continued under Bill Clinton. Reagan’s Secretary of Education derided the notion of education helping people recover from poverty, and Reagan compared Pell recipients to welfare moms. Clinton then cratered financial aid for poor kids, at the same time he brought the U.S. into the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, predicting that offshoring would be a win-win for American workers. NAFTA took a million jobs, and subsequent free trade agreements and globalization another four million jobs. 

Free trade, and anger over it, was cited in presidential election exit polls as a reason for Trump flipping Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan red in 2016. Macys writes that Democrats should have embraced unionism, a la Bernie Sanders, but instead, rural communities have been abandoned by the Democratic Party, leaving small town America available for the Republican Party to feed on. Local news, particularly in rural America, has been decimated, so people get their information from Facebook posts and press releases. This leads to a split of society, where people aren’t given real information and can easily descend into tribalism. Quoted is the philosopher Richard Rorty who in 1998 predicted that globalization and inequality would lead to class resentment, and someone would tap into it and be elected as a strongman, proclaiming that he’ll make the elites pay. Trump in 2024 won 91% of the counties lacking a professional news source.

Macys with her book went back to Urbana to write on what had become of the town. She notes that just 37% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree, and only 16% in Urbana. The mayor, Bill Bean, who took over his dad’s successful insurance business that started in 1866, says college is overrated and the town’s 16% college graduation rate doesn’t bother him. Also noted is how someone who ran against Bean and lost now runs a youth center that Urbana’s establishment blocked from receiving a $2M grant from the state. 

When you’re working class, good schools and social connections are sustenance. However, the Urbana that Macys returned to featured schools with large numbers of parents yelling at teachers, and take their kids out, professing to homeschool them, but just not wanting to be responsible for their truancy when kids just weren’t showing up for school. It’s noted that homeschooling is now the fastest growing form of education in the country, with the gutting of public schools creating separate educational systems. When people lose faith in their schools, and what they can do for their kids, it's a crisis. If kids don’t see a way out, and low-income kids aren’t exposed to normal and good while at school, it’s too easy for them to become stuck. 

Factories shut down, union jobs go away, leaving low paying jobs, and when there are good jobs, it can be hard for employers to be get good workers. Enough people couldn’t be found for skilled manufacturing jobs that the Biden Administration was subsidizing. The few who go away to college don’t return, so there’s no models for kids, leaving Urbana what Macys describes as a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place. She tells the story of recent Urbana High graduate Silas James and covers how something as basic as reliable transportation to a job or school can be so vital to someone's efforts. Macys also writes about how her older sister denied sexual abuse allegations by her daughter Liza, against her stepdad. It’s heartbreaking reading and while Paper Girl is a good book, it’s also a tough one.

Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren

Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren is a solid novel, one with heart, that features as its lead one of the secondary characters from Huckleberry Finn. It was interesting reading in the postscript of the work that Jahren put into getting characters and historical details right, creating a fictional work grounded in facts.

The book is an adventure tale, starting with fourteen-year-old Mary Jane in 1846 being sent 400 miles down the Mississippi River by her mother Ida to go help her aunt Evelyn, who is caring for her injured husband George and raising daughters Susan and Joanna. She took the steamboat Minnesota Belle down the Mississippi, and then went about the Galenian, helmed by Mrs. Captain, who would become Mary Jane's good friend. The Galenian was coal-powered, with the boiler known as Robert Fulton, and Mary Jane worked while aboard, helping Mrs. Captain run the ship. She was then met by the Schmidt family, Mormons who took Mary Jane to her aunt, uncle, and cousins, where she discovered that her extended family had little, but she could help. George had suffered a head injury and wasn't able to work, and Evelyn was caring for he and the two girls, and the Schmidts giving provisions every Sunday. 

Mary Jane was a worker and tirelessly helped the family. Things were going well, with Uncle George improving, until he had a seizure, developing paralysis, then Evelyn got sick. Mary Jane had been exposed to the illness, but quickly recovered, and the Schmidt family took in Susan and Joanna so that they wouldn't catch it while Mary Jane tried to nurse Aunt Evelyn back to health. It turned out to be unsuccessful and Evelyn died, with George dying shortly after. Mary Jane decided to be responsible for her cousins and planned to take them back to her family, but a judge decided that they, including Mary Jane who said that she their sister, should go live with a relative of their father, Peter Wilks of Greenville, MS. 

For the trip to Greenville, the girls wound up back on the Galenian, with Mrs. Captain. Also onboard the ship was a boy not yet ten-years-old, Rooster, who Mrs. Captain had befriended and was working in the ship. Mrs. Captain noted that he "didn't have a good start," but was doing a great job working and living on the ship as first mate. Mrs. Captain would speak of others by saying "it doesn't cost anything to be kind" and her plan was to give the Galenian to Rooster in a few years when she retires. Peter Wilks, Susan and Joanna's uncle, was not a good man. The three girls befriended a dog, that they named Cherry, who never left their side. Wilks fell ill and died and into the picture came two people who pretended to be his brothers, and with them was a young man who Mary Jane became taken with. Peter Wilks' actual brothers showed up, were good men, and Susan and Joanna decided to go back to London with them. Once more the girls spent time on the Galenian with Mrs. Captain and Rooster, and Mary Jane went and found the young man, who turned out to be Huck Finn. 

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy is a compelling, dark, and lovely novel set on Shearwater, a fictional island based on Macquarie Island halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica. The book features the characters of widower Dominic Salt, his three children Fen, Raff, and Orly, and a woman, Rowan, who washes ashore while coming to try to aid her husband, who was the lead botanist on Shearwater.

The Salts had been on the island eight years, with Fen seventeen-years-old, Raff eighteen, and Orly nine. Dominic is caretaker of Shearwater, in charge of fixing things broken, but the people on it a bit broken inside. Dom would speak to his wife, who died of cancer at the time of Orly's birth. Fen sleeps at the boathouse to create space for herself, and Raff's boyfriend Alex committed suicide on the island. 

Shearwater is a fascinating setting in the book, with it housing an enormous seed bank containing some three million varieties of seeds. It's there to preserve plants from going extinct, especially in the fact of climate disaster threatening the global food supply. Reference is made throughout the book to deteriorating conditions in the outside world, with fires, floods, and food scarcity. The island is also natively home to plants that don't grow in other regions and the kids' connection to the animals of Shearwater, particularly the whales and seals, is great reading. 

Weather conditions on the island deteriorated, and the Salts and Rowan are waiting for the scheduled boat to come six weeks off to evacuate them and the seeds they deem most vital to be saved. It comes out that Rowan's husband Hank had an affair with Fen, thirty years his junior, then wanted to drown all the seeds as he wouldn't have been able to take them off the island and couldn't bear to pick some, but not others. He then tried to drown Fen when she told him she might be pregnant. Around this same time, Alex's brother Tom and his research partner Naija drowned, Alex killed himself, and then Rowan washed ashore. The Salts told her that Hank had left the island, not that he was being held in advance of the rescue ship coming to Shearwater.

The book hops back and forth between first-person narration by the various characters ands that makes it a somewhat disquieting read, but it pays off at the devastatingly beautiful end, with the seed vault starting to flood and Rowan giving Orly her last breaths so that he can live. In the afterword, McConaghy notes having been on Macquarie with her sixteen-month-old son, and how awe-inspiring the island was. 

All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert

All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert is a heavy, but also beautiful nonfiction subtitled Love, Loss, and Liberation. Gilbert writes about her late soulmate, Rayya Elias, the drug and alcohol addition she had, and Rayya's death from liver cancer. Also, Gilbert writes about her own sex and love addiction, how her story with Rayya was one of friendship, romance, beauty, rage, and pain, and Gilbert's recovery from her addiction.

Gilbert had to be involved in the dramas of other people, always checking in, helping them recover, being the savior. She would also become wrapped up in relationships, them turning immediately all-consuming. She was a romantic obsessive, an enabler, and codependent. Having money from her book Eat Pray Love gave fuel to the fire, she could afford to gift huge amounts, trying to save others from their problems. 

When Gilbert and Rayya didn't know each other well, Gilbert gave the gift of free lodging to Rayya after a mutual friend said that Rayya going through a hard time from a breakup. They became close friends and after Rayya's cancer diagnosis, with a six-month life expectancy, they fell into one another and started a relationship. They went everywhere, doing everything, including drugs and alcohol. For a time it was great, then it wasn't, as Rayya had experience as a drug addict, and had returned to it.

Rayya had a horrible decline back into addiction and covered in the book is how when someone an addict, the things they do and say are said and done by someone else entirely. Rayya herself had years prior told someone that when dealing with a family member who was an addict, they were no longer dealing with them, but with a vampire. They might come back to being a person, but that was up to them alone. People have to want to get clean, they can't because someone else wants them to. Rayya lived twenty months after her diagnosis and Gilbert had to leave Rayya to save herself. She had hit caregiver collapse, with Rayya's drug and alcohol addiction and Gilbert's sex and love addiction supercharging the dysfunction and then collapse.

At the end of Rayya's life, Gilbert was there, and Gilbert in her pain spun into her sex and love addiction, and then confronted it. She notes recovery from addiction of all kinds is possible, but it's hard, and requires constant effort and vigilance. The twelve steps work as long as they're worked at and the rooms of recovery, meetings, sponsors, and check ins are all needed. Gilbert went first a day, then thirty days clean from her addiction, then added on giving up alcohol and then drugs, then a year clean, then five years clean at the time of writing. The book notes that addiction is insidious, and addicts can't do normal things like normal people. Gilbert recounts a story about how an addict will always reach a point where they might relapse, and then have thirty seconds to save their life, and decide to either go to the addiction or run the other way. 

It's a beautiful story about both Rayya and Gilbert, but also a rough one, not a story that's puppies and rainbows during someone's final magical, mystical days left on earth. Gilbert includes drawings, poems, and sayings between chapters, including about her recovery from addiction, Give in. Give up. Give over. Towards the very end, Gilbert writes as part of "A Poem for Rayya, Six Years Gone" the statement I had to stay because I'm just beginning. You had to leave because you're done.

Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard

Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard is a solid work of nonfiction about the 1881 murder of President James Garfield. Millard in the book delves into Garfield's rise to the presidency, his shooting, and attempts to save his life, including the medical quackery practiced by his doctor that made the attack a fatal one.

Garfield was shot four months after his inauguration, by Charles Guiteau. He had been rebuffed in his attempts to be named ambassador to France, and believed that he would receive great acclaim for killing Garfield. Right after the shooting, doctors were sticking unsterilized fingers into the wound, probing unsuccessfully for the bullet and introducing infection more lethal than the bullet. Garfield then went under the care of Dr. Willard Bliss, who tightly controlled access to the president, keeping himself solely in charge of treatment. Bliss was a proponent of allopathy, or administering large doses of harsh medicines to counteract the original ailment. Joseph Lister at the same time was attempting to convince American doctors of the importance of antisepsis, preventing infection by destroying germs. Antisepsis means anything coming into the contact with the patient is sterilized, and was already applied with great success in Europe, but largely rejected in America, including by Bliss.

Millard also covers Alexander Graham Bell and his attempts to use his induction balance invention, a precursor to the x-ray machine, to find the bullet in Garfield. Bell was unsuccessful in part because Bliss commanded him to only search the part of the body where he incorrectly believed the bullet to be. Had Garfield been shot fifteen years later, x-rays would have found the bullet, and he would have been treated with antiseptic surgery, certainly surviving. Or, if he had been simply left alone after being shot, he would likely have survived, with the bullet remaining in his body, but without infection. It was noted how many injured during the Civil War just decades prior would miraculously survive seemingly cataclysmic injuries. They often didn't have access to care, so weren't treated by doctors who introduced germs and ultimately infection into their systems. 

Garfield spent two months at the White House, with his body wracked by infection and additionally shoddy care from Bliss, and when gravely ill, demanded to be moved to the coast, where he died two weeks later. Chester Arthur was sworn in as president, and Guiteau then hanged for murder.

The Devil Reached Toward the Sky by Garrett M. Graff

The Devil Reached Toward the Sky by Garrett M. Graff is an excellent book subtitled An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb. Graff covers in detail the events around the bomb, it's origins, building, dropping of it twice on Japan, and effects of that. It was developed for use against Germany, and the intensity of work was to get the bomb developed before Hitler could. Germany never came close to developing the bomb, in part due to antisemitism casting out of scientists, some of whom fled Europe and then were involved in the effort. Germany had dropped out of the war by the time of the bombings, which were done to save the lives of American soldiers who otherwise might have died in a ground invasion of Japan. 

The Manhattan Project to create the bomb was a science and math achievement, but also just as much an industrial manufacturing achievement, one conducted in secret. At the University of Chicago they showed the bomb could be possible, creating a chain-reacting pile of uranium. Hanford, WA was the site of the plutonium refinement plant, Oak Ridge, TN of uranium refinement, and Los Alamos, NM where the bomb was built. 75,000 people were working in and around Oak Ridge by the end of the war, over 8,000 at Los Alamos, and 45,000 at Hanford. 

The project director was General Leslie Groves and in charge of building the bomb was J. Robert Oppenheimer. Other drivers of the project were Vannevar Bush, head of the science effort, James B. Conant, president of Harvard, Enrico Fermi, a physicist who was deputy to Groves, Richard Feynman, Otto Frisch, and Edward Teller. Noted was how important "energy = mass X the speed of light," squared by Albert Einstein is. Graff covers Feynman highlighting the "atomic hypothesis, that all things are made of atoms, little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."

The bomber wing was the 509th Composite Group, one, including transport supply aircraft, designed to fly a single weapon. They trained at Wendover Field at the Utah, Nevada state line. The bombs were dropped by B-29s, and airmen at first were reluctant to fly the B-29 as they were worried about its safety. To convince the men to fly the B-29, women, who weren't allowed to fly in combat, were recruited to fly it, and then when men saw this, they went ahead. After the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945, Harry S. Truman became President and was told about the bomb, with the full description provided by Vannevar Bush. Germany surrendered May 8, and the Trinity test of the bomb was July 16 in a remote corner of the New Mexico desert. 

The first bomb was transported on the U.S.S. Indianapolis to Tinian, 40 square miles and 1,500 miles from Japan. The Enola Gay, piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets, was the plane that dropped on Hiroshima August 6, 1945, with Nagasaki three days later. The mission over Hiroshima was a textbook effort, that which dropped on Nagasaki was riddled with problems, including a switch from Kokura to Nagasaki as the target due to cloud cover and barely landing on Okinawa, the closest American base, while little fuel after dropping the bomb. 

In Hiroshima, 70,000 of the city's 76,000 homes were destroyed. Casualty reports had 66,000 dying in the initial blast and another 140,000 by the end of the year, roughly half the city's residents. Japan initiated surrender negotiations the day after Nagasaki, and then surrendered August 15, 1945. As people in the days and weeks and months after would suffer from radiation poisoning, the U.S. government denied that there were any lasting effects of the atomic explosions. In early 1946, New Yorker correspondent John Hershey traveled to Hiroshima, and then the August 31, 1946 issue of the magazine devoted the entire issue, 30,000 words, to covering what happened in the city. The book closes with the Albert Einstein quote "I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth... rocks."

Who is Government? by Michael Lewis

Who is Government? by Michael Lewis is a solid compilation book subtitled The Untold Story of Public Service. It came out of a series of essays done for The Washington Post, and features ten profiles of government employees by nine different writers, with Lewis providing the first and last essay.

“The Canary” by Lewis is about Christopher Mark, a former coal miner who led the development of industry-wide standards to prevent roof falls in mines. His work, accounting for all conditions in a given mine, led to 2016 being the first year of no U.S. mining roof fall fatalities. It’s a fascinating view into someone who studied mining engineering at Penn State and wound up working for the Bureau of Mines. 

“The Sentinel” by Casey Cep covers Ronald E. Walters of the National Cemetery Association. It details what’s done on behalf of military veterans after they pass away, and how each is entitled to a military funeral, regardless of where or how they died. Walters is in charge of this effort, including maintaining cemeteries around the world and online records of veterans who have died. It’s a wonderful story about the pursuit of excellence for an important cause. 

“The Searchers” by Dave Eggers is about employees at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory looking for the extraterrestrial life that they’re confident is out there. They’re searching for exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, that can support life, either intelligent life or even just bacteria. One of those profiled is Nick Siegler, the chief technologist for NASA’s exoplanet program. He was a chemical engineer, working in industry, and then at 32 applied and was accepted to Harvard’s Special Students program, and then 43 when he completed his PhD and started at NASA. 

“The Number” by John Lanchester details the consumer price index produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and includes mention of the misery index, the unemployment rate plus inflation. It’s noted how a high misery index almost always correlates with the political party holding the White House losing it. The exception to this was the 2024 election, where the misery index was low, but food inflation was talked about in the news to the point where people felt it a huge problem. 

“The Equalizer” by Sarah Vowell profiles Pamela Wright of the National Archives and Records Administration, and her efforts as the NARA Chief Innovation Officer to make records available for people, particularly online. Reference is made to History Hub on the NARA website, where people can submit a query and it will be answered by NARA archivists, federal staffers, and citizen volunteers, a Google search done by people. Also noted is how census records are made public 72 years after the fact, to protect privacy, and the information that people can gather on their ancestors. Mentioned as well is the staff of the National Archives are responsible for physically protecting the actual Constitution.

“The Free-Living Bureaucrat” by Michael Lewis covers Heather Stone of the Food and Drug Administration. There’s a fascinating story within about rare diseases, and how those who contract them are underserved because the disease too rare to warrant pharmaceutical company focus. Lewis writes about Walter and Amanda Smith, and their daughter Alaina. At the age of five she had a medical emergency where she seemed to suffer a seizure. Doctors diagnosed her with epilepsy, but then after her family demanded an MRI, an infection was found in her brain, one caused by her having Balamuthia, an amoeba that can enter the brain through dust and consume it. When they received this information, fewer than 200 cases had been reported worldwide, and 95% of the people infected had died from it. Heather was working in the FDA and developed and was trying to promote use of a tool to catalog treatments of rare diseases. CURE ID was designed not to be about methods that had gone through the approved for public use process, but anecdotal information that could help people learn from what others in their situation did. There’s some half a dozen cases a year of Balamuthia reported in the U.S. and the treatment that the Smiths had available for their daughter was a poor blend of cocktails, ones that just made her sick. Amanda heard about a drug out of China that might be effective at treating Balamuthia and created a LinkedIn account through which she found Heather Stone's name and called her. Stone knew of a supply of pills in California and arranged for them to ship to Dallas where Amanda's daughter was. Also, Stone obtained a letter from the FDA’s review division saying that the receiving hospital could provide the pills, extending Alaina's life.

Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride by Will Leitch

Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride by Will Leitch is a nice novel that starts with the main character, Lloyd, an Atlanta police officer with a thirteen-year-old son, Bishop, finding out he has just months to live. 

Lloyd comes from a police family, with his father having been a tough as nails Major, but he's a beat cop focused on trying to help people through his job. As Atlanta citizens would would record with their phones he and other police at work, Lloyd would regularly assume the persona of Happycop, your friendly neighborhood officer.

After finding out about the brain tumor that would soon kill him, Lloyd worries about how to provide for Bishop after he's gone, and comes up with the idea to accomplish this by dying in the line of duty. The book both funny and a lovely story about family, legacy, and what people will do for one another. 

Similar to two other novels from Leitch, How Lucky and The Time Has Come, it's a short book that's also memorable for the heart it has.

Isola by Allegra Goodman

Isola by Allegra Goodman is a captivating novel that begins in 1531 with twelve-year-old Marguerite, whose mother died during Marguerite's both, and father at war when she three. Her guardian was her father's cousin, Roberval, and Marguerite lived with her nurse Damienne, and friend Claire, with Claire's mother her teacher. 

Roberval was a sea-faring man, who would go on voyages at the king's behest. He began to take Marguerite's family money, first renting out the property where she lived, forcing her to stay in guest bedrooms, When Marguerite was seventeen, he decreed that she and Damienne would join his voyage across the Atlantic to the new world. Roberval considered himself a man of God, and gave Marguerite psalms to study and would test her piety while treating her poorly as a source of amusement. 

While on the ship, Marguerite developed a relationship with Roberval's secretary, Auguste, who had been instructed to stay away from her. To punish them, Roberval had the two, along with Damienne, abandoned with meager supplies and weapons on an island off the far north coast of North America. 

 Left to fend for themselves, the three hunted for birds, scavenged eggs, and fished. By September, the leaves had changed color and it turned cold, so they lived in a cavern for the winter. Auguste died while Marguerite pregnant, and she killed a polar bear that had scavenged his body. The baby was born in the spring, and died of malnourishment. In summer, Marguerite and Damienne saw Roberval's ships and signaled, but the ships continued on, leaving the two banished. Damienne in autumn accidentally cut herself and died of infection. Marguerite later killed a second polar bear, cutting off and keeping its claw. 

As her supplies dwindled further, Marguerite saw two open boats anchored, and men that came ashore. She convinced them to let her come onboard for the voyage back to France. The other of the two boats was lost at sea, and Marguerite after her arrival found that Roberval had sold her estate. She reconnected with Claire and Claire's mother, and met the Queen, who gave money for she, Claire, and Claire's mother to start a school for girls. Roberval attempted to get at some of these funds, and was rebuffed by Marguerite. While it would have been nice if the revenge on Roberval were more pronounced, it's a good book, a page turner.

Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson

Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson is a fun novel by the author of the excellent Nothing to See Here. His latest work of fiction starts with a farmer in Tennessee, Mad Hill, having a visitor arrive, Rube Hill, a writer from Boston. Rube who he says that he believes Mad is his half-sister, with their father having abandoned each of them with no future contact, and subsequently starting new families. 

The two embark on a cross-country road trip in Rube's rented PT Cruiser to find and talk with their father, and pick up along the way two additional half-siblings who their dad also left, college basketball star Pep and fifth-grader Tom. The story features an entertaining romp from the farm in Tennessee to Oklahoma, Pep's NCAA tournament game in Austin, Salt Lake City, and finally Woodside, California. The four half-siblings meet their now seventy-year-old father and his newest child, two-year-old Rooster. 

The relationship between Mad, Rube, Pep, and Tom grows each step of the way across the country, with them protecting each other and there for one another. Tom is described as having gone from feeling like he all alone, orphaned by his father, to having three siblings with him, and then a fourth in young Rooster. 

It's not obvious in the beginning of the book that it's going to be about the connections made, but that gradually takes shape and is revealed through the story told well by Wilson.

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reed

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reed is a compelling novel set both in space and on earth. It jumps back and forth in time, both when astronaut candidates are training, and when several are on the space shuttle.

The book begins in 1984 with main character Joan Goodwin of NASA in Houston as the CAPCOM, the one person communicating with astronauts on a 1984 mission. She's in contact with Vanessa Ford on the shuttle, who needs to try to get back home after two died and two were critically injured, with the shuttle saved by the actions of Lydia Danes before she went unconscious. Mention is made of the loop, where people outside of NASA can listen to the live audio from mission control, with that audio then reported around the world in an emergency situation. 

Goodwin was an astronomer and it's solid writing on how she connects with Danes. Ford is the other main character, with her coming to NASA wanting to pilot the shuttle, but not a military pilot so there as an aeronautical engineer. 

The women were part of NASA's first training group with females, and much of the book is set earlier in time, with them as astronaut candidates. The relationship between Goodwin and Ford in detailed, and there's a lot about Goodwin's sister Barbara and young niece Frances. The part where Goodwin professes to Frances how she will always be there for her is beautiful, and the ending similarly lovely. Also, blurbs are provided by the writers Kristin Hannah and Andy Weir, and Jenkins Reed makes mention of how helpful to the writing of the book was Paul Dye, former NASA flight director and author of Shuttle, Houston.