Sex On The Moon: The Amazing Story Behind The Most Audacious Heist In History / by Ben Mezirch

Thad Roberts was the quintessential brainy guy with not a lot of moral intelligence. Born in Utah to a devout Mormon family, he soon followed a different path--he was actually kicked out of the house in his teen years for engaging in premarital sex. Though certainly smart enough, endowed with the natural gifts to excel academically, he could never quite get past the juvenile hijinks of his formative years and wound up in his early twenties aimless, jobless and unhappily married. Somehow Roberts managed to gain entry into a course of study at the University of Utah where he demonstrated enough prowess to ultimately earn a coveted summer internship with NASA in Houston. He spent three summers doing the rounds at the Johnson Space Center, working with the spacehab and biology personnel during the day and living it up in his off hours, supervising recreational activities and partying at the local hotspots (it's not hard to recognize a lot of familiar haunts) with his fellow interns.

In 2002, out of little more than a desire to impress a girl (not his former wife), Roberts stumbled upon a seemingly inane, though obviously appealing enough plan to steal some of the original moon rocks obtained during the Apollo missions from a loosely secured safe at the JSC main site. That he got away with it wasn't such a big deal--he and his girlfriend actually drove the 600 ib. safe off the site in their Jeep Cherokee--until he tried selling the rocks on the black market, a move inevitably garnering attention from a curious precious metals dealer who, upon verification of the rocks' authenticity, alerted the FBI. It wasn't long before Roberts and his girlfriend as well as a third party were arrested, tried and convicted. Roberts got 8 years in a federal prison while his accomplices got off with relatively lighter sentences, doing probation and forbidden from any type of government employment.

Writer Ben Mezrich does an nice job of rallying interest in the space program even having missed the boat by a few decades and he well-captures Roberts mindless enthusiasm though that's a bit of a problem in itself; Roberts is kind of a mixed bag that we never quite nail down. If the bulk of the narrative is to be believed, he's a bonafide life-of-the-party type A personality with a bent towards self-destructive choices and a penchant for hustling naive women. Yet you have to wonder at the sheer lunacy of some of his decision-making--stealing the rocks is one thing but exposing himself by trying to sell them is exceedingly stupid--as well as the inner-dynamics of his flighty relationships and a spotty academic background prior to NASA, all things the book doesn't quite cover well enough. This isn't the author's best outing (it may have been something the publisher pushed for). The Accidental Billionaires, in which the movie The Social Network was loosely based on, was a better read with more pertinent content and a far more credible story to apply his sensationalized style to. (364.1628552 MEZRICH)

Voyager / by Srikanth Reddy

In one of the more creative concepts for a book ever (even poetry), author Srikanth Reddy explores the realms of material consciousness even as the object of his examination probes the physical boundaries of creation itself. In Voyager, the very concepts of life and matter are embodied, reawakened in a spiritual and figurative catharsis involving past transgressions, present distortions and a clever amalgamation of time and 'space'. The original source of his content, a print message and memoir authored by former U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, is currently (at this moment) traveling on an interplanetary journey out of Earth's solar system aboard the Voyager I satellite. The spacecraft, launched back in 1977, is now the furthest man-made object from Earth. The irony of the situation is that, post-1977, Waldheim was indicted and partially proven guilty of Nazi war crimes--as an SS Intelligence Officer, evidence showed he at least knew about certain intricate aspects of the Final Solution--and was party to further anti-Semitic political maneuverings during his tenure as the Austrian president. Reddy literally dissects, inter-cuts, rearranges and subliminally alters Waldheim's own words to reflect the paradoxical truth of an object intended to confront phenomenon beyond our terrestrial means, but which conceals crucial truths, explicit and otherwise, about our own world underneath its veneer.

Without knowing the context, it might be hard not to judge Reddy's carefully crafted, abstract exposition as too dense. The quirky alliteration ("Is is./The self is a suffering form./War is a failure of form") intro's the three part book in sparse, minimalistic fashion before the middle section segues into more direct territory ("This is the universal journey/the gravest proclaimed/in a universal language."). At times the narration overtly renders the author himself as the speaker, an individual with only a conceptual knowledge of his subject ("In my office a globe was set up/less a world than a history of imperialism and corruption"). Other portions speak in another voice, projections of a seemingly nebulous entity, which grasp out at the very substance of consciousness ("creation and fall,/I found fences/all laid down in blood.") Reddy, a literature professor at the University of Chicago, certainly has a gift for nuance and his range in wordplay is unquestionably superior. This is only his second published work of poetry. (811.6 REDDY)

Challenger Park / by Stephen Harrigan

Lucy Kincheloe is no ordinary working-mom. A wife, mother, and NASA astronaut, her life holds a cosmic element even if currently her dream of spaceflight looms in bureaucratic limbo. For now she's focused on her young daughter and seriously asthmatic son while husband Brian--also an astronaut--orbits the earth overhead in his second trip to outerspace. When, upon return, a shuttle mishap is informally acknowledged as Brian's fault, his resentment boils over at home creating instability in the couple's already tenuous marriage. A slot on the next shuttle mission allocated for Lucy--her lifelong dream--does little to alleviate tension; only inflating Brian's resentment. Between her child's near fatal asthma attacks, Brian's sulky attitude, and her own deathly fear of catastrophe, stress presses down hard on Lucy causing cracks in her always-stable identity.

Spliced into the drama is an emerging relationship between Lucy and recently-widowed, mission coordinator Walt Womack; a man taunted by his own internal demons. Desperately needing escape from a nonstop world of demands, their professional lives soon merge into an affair which, despite heed to the potential consequences, overwhelms their conscious resolve. With the take-off date nearing Lucy deals with more than the rigors of pre-flight preparation: she faces the unavoidable decision to leave her family for Walt.

Aside from well-plugged, can't-miss-it local color, this read offers what so many "space" books don't--real life stuff. Harrigan, a frequent contributor to Texas Monthly, does a good job to juggle the techie space protocol and interpersonal drama without diluting the primary storyline: an account of one woman's voyage into outerspace.