Synopses & Reviews
Review
"The Mercury 13 ought to be on the shelf next to The Right Stuff as a glaring and embarrassing counterpoint to the triumph of the boys' club and its fighter jocks. Ackmann has done outstanding investigative reporting." William E. Burrows, author of This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age
Review
"[A] sharply pointed narrative [about how thirteen] highly skilled fliers were grounded, leaving it to the Russians to put a woman in space fully twenty years before the American government saw fit to do so. A shameful episode exposed with thoroughness and a graceful pen." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Ackmann has done a magnificent job of gathering information, conducting interviews and weaving the strands into an utterly compelling book that deserves to be widely read well beyond the circles of the usual readers about the space program." Publishers Weekly
Review
"A shameful episode exposed with a thoroughness and graceful pen." Kirkus
About the Author
Martha Ackmann teaches at Mount Holyoke College, is a frequent columnist, and has written for publications including
The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the
Chicago Tribune, and the
Los Angeles Times. Ackmann is co-recipient of the Amelia Earhart Research Scholars Grant. She lives in western Massachusetts.
Lynn Sherr, correspondent for the ABC News program 20/20, covered NASA and the space program in the 1980s, anchoring and reporting on all the early shuttle missions, through the Challenger explosion and the subsequent Rogers Commission hearings. Sherr was a semifinalist in the (now abandoned) Journalist-in-Space competition. She lives in New York.