RaveThe Los Angeles ReviewWhat I found to be most compelling about this memoir, and there was a lot to be considered, was the relation to geography, the physical place in which Halberstadt was writing about, animating, and the emotional landscape. In his prose, the two types of land become one, merging. When recounting the story of his maternal Grandparents, the story of Lithuanian Jews between the two capital cities of Kaunas and Vilnius, he anchors these family members spiritually to their environments. He not only reports historical information of violence and antisemitism, but the lasting effects of genocide and bloodshed on a landscape ... Halberstadt, through his writing, dispels the myth that tragedy cannot happen in beautiful places ... Halberstadt, and his family’s story, is the living example of taking advantage of resources and stories while they are still alive and willing to be told. Young Heroes solves the question of how shifts in cultures, say from the USSR to America, can affect an individual, on a minuscule scale that affects the quietest of family dynamics and the mundane realities of our day to day lives.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
PositiveThe Washington PostThrough ample research and nimble storytelling, Tyson and his co-author and longtime editor and researcher, Avis Lang, trace the long and tangled relationship between state power and astronomy ... Given President Trump’s recent proposal for a U.S. Space Force to bundle existing space-security efforts into a new military branch, this discussion seems especially timely. Readers hungry for an engaging, well-researched primer on space military policy and its history will be edified. Readers who prefer astronomy and want to learn about satellites that look up into space rather than those that look down at rival nations might find these sections less compelling ... Only a few quibbles: When the book veers into space policy, it becomes less focused. Although Tyson and Lang repeatedly argue for a two-way street between war and astronomy, the contemporary cases they present seem to show otherwise ... Still, kudos to Tyson and Lang for pointing out the quandary, taking a deep and eloquent look at it, and offering a way forward.
