PositiveThe Washington Post... a quixotic and somewhat meandering journey of a book, but one powerfully propelled by the force of Roach’s unflinching fascination with the weird, the gross and the downright improbable. Some nonfiction writers like to blend into the background, like game hunters in a blind, waiting for their subjects to produce the perfect quote; Roach is just as likely to stumble into the frame to deliver one of her own ... There’s a wacky genius to these interjections, frequently made at her own expense and often amid some particularly gory set-dressing ... The effect is one of hapless relatability: author as bumbling travel companion, or as court jester, expertly capering to disguise her expertise ... Below the clever surface of her prose runs a preoccupation with human occupations ... a similar nearsightedness keeps the lens trained on individual characters while sometimes overlooking systemic problems. Climate change, for instance, makes only two appearances in the book, although nearly every problem she catalogues will be exacerbated by increasing instability in the relationships between humans, plants and animals. Roach is certainly aware of this, but you get the sense that it would be a bit of a buzzkill to point it out; even someone who can so adroitly crack a joke over a corpse may have some trouble with the big C...This emphasis on the human scale does deliver satisfying payoffs.
Nicholas Schmidle
PositiveThe Washington PostSchmidle reconstructs the decade between Branson’s promise and Alsbury’s accident, in a cinematic style that moves seamlessly in and out of characters’ inner monologues ... Schmidle’s careful attention to detail pays off in fluid, precise prose, even as the story settles into the familiar contours ... He narrates Stucky’s thoughts with moment-by-moment clarity that conceals the painstaking work that has gone into piecing together this collage of interviews, emails, videos and news accounts. High-stakes test flights are treated to this enhanced replay, but so are other moments: Stucky having dinner at home with his second wife, Cheryl Agin, or reading a Facebook message from Dillon. Schmidle is determined to make sense of all it, frame by frame ... Schmidle\'s care over these terrestrial scenes sets this book apart from more familiar representations of airborne masculinity.
Richard Panek
PositiveThe Washington Post...no new mysteries were solved in the making of this book. Instead, by unfolding the succession of visions and revisions that led to our current cosmic understanding, Panek sets out to demonstrate how fundamental, and how fundamentally strange, gravity really is ... The implications are...dizzying, and Panek takes evident pleasure in the whirl of new ideas. There are multiverses and quantum dynamics, pulsars and hypothetical particles, as Panek unearths the uncommon wonder hiding behind common unintelligibility.
