A Girl's Guide to Missiles
Growing Up in America's Secret Desert
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A Girl's Guide to Missiles
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Narrado por:
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Rebecca Lowman
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De:
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Karen Piper
A surreal and poignant coming of age on a secretive missile facility, and "an incredible view of...life in a town built for war." (Booklist)
The China Lake missile range is located in a huge stretch of the Mojave Desert, about the size of the state of Delaware. It was created during the Second World War, and has always been shrouded in secrecy. But people who make missiles and other weapons are regular working people, with domestic routines and everyday dilemmas, and four of them were Karen Piper's parents, her sister, and - when she needed summer jobs - herself. Her dad designed the Sidewinder, which was ultimately used catastrophically in Vietnam. When her mom got tired of being a stay-at-home mom, she went to work on the Tomahawk. Once, when a missile nose needed to be taken offsite for final testing, her mother loaded it into the trunk of the family car and set off down a Los Angeles freeway. Traffic was heavy, and so she stopped off at the mall, leaving the missile in the parking lot.
Piper sketches in the belief systems - from Amway's get-rich schemes to propaganda in The Rocketeer to evangelism, along with fears of a Lemurian takeover and Charles Manson - that governed their lives. Her memoir is also a search for the truth of the past and what really brought her parents to China Lake with two young daughters, a story that reaches back to her father's World War II flights with contraband across Europe. Finally, it recounts the crossroads moment in a young woman's life when she finally found a way out of a culture of secrets and fear, and out of the desert.
©2018 Karen Piper (P)2018 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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“Karen Piper's A Girl's Guide To Missiles reaches back into the body of American war and retrieves the heart of a girl, still beating, not beaten. Her memoir riveted me - I read it in one sitting holding my breath as she made a story braid from growing up a girl and growing up in the military industrial complex at the China Lake missile range. Gender, family, war, and American myth-making make this an unforgettable book and a radical act of truth-telling.” (Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Chronology of Water)
“Karen Piper lived the escalating levels of insanity of the cold war from the inside, playing her girlhood games in the top secret labs and working beside her parents in a hidden corner of the Mojave. The bombs of tomorrow were a family affair, and the truth was always tricky. For Piper, who writes like a dream, failed test shots mirror busted romances, and the excesses of the era eventually lead our missile girl to communal life in a bomb-proof Oregon. A Girl’s Guide to Missiles is a family portrait, a missile-science primer, a coming of nuclear age. Piper captures the soul of an era that might not be so long gone as we would hope.” (Bill Roorbach, author of Life Among Giants, The Remedy for Love, and The Girl of the Lake)
“Brilliantly overdetermined setup, one that yields both black comedy and sickening lurches of insight.” (Harper's)
For years, I’ve described China Lake as “Los Alamos Lite.” I did not know that the triggering mechanism for one of the 2 atomic bombs was developed there! So there was a connection, even though I was just trying to describe what it felt like to live there. What I remember was a community of extremely smart and accomplished people dedicated to science and education who made sure that the schools their children attended were first rate. Piper's time in the Christian school is different from my experience. But in the totality of her overall story, it describes the difficulty fundamentalist Christians have reconciling their beliefs with science, especially when science is their career.
I remember a classmate of mine who’s father invented the Sidewinder. Given my grade school years of ’56 to ’59, this is likely to be true. The Sidewinder is the best known achievement of the China Lake community. It’s fine with me that Piper gives her father credit for working on it; it has been through many iterations.
I gained my love for science in the schools in China Lake and the truly “learning community” that was fostered by the parents in our neighborhood. We spent endless hours, without adults around, catching lizards and reading about them on our own.
I remember being outside in the night with the neighborhood kids and parents, spotting and tracking Sputnik across the sky. I remember the worry in the air; but I also remember the adults assuring us that we weren’t so far behind. These adults probably knew better than most.
The reviews criticizing this book miss the point (this includes Amazon reviews of the printed book). More accurately, they confuse the trees for the forest. Nit-picking details about whether jets flew low over China Lake and Ridgecrest while she lived there contradicts my memories of the same! Maybe I’m confusing these memories with attending air shows, but when I lived there, I remember stories about pilots doing this, ala Chuck Yeager.
Similar to other reviewers, I wanted more China Lake history, but Piper’s memoir of her imperfect life tell a story of a woman determined to grow despite missteps. She is always grateful and kind to her family, and to the odd place that is China Lake. I was gratified that her story took her to finding the archives of the years her family worked there. It was stunning to read her discovery about the global warming warnings from a China Lake scientist during the mid ’60’s. Talk about missed opportunities!
A couple days before discovering this book on Audible, I had been looking at Google Maps, trying to figure out where I had lived and landmarks I might remember. Thank you Karen Piper for making this journey come to life!
It's about more than China Lake!
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Great book
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The book has quite a bit of humor. Overall, I was disappointed in the book. Maybe because I also grew up in the area, I expected more from the book. There was also a number of inaccuracies in the book.
The book is ten hours twenty-eight minutes. Rebecca Lowman does a good job narrating the book. Lowman is an award-winning actress and has won the Earphone Award as a narrator.
Middling
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I really enjoyed it!
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Needed a better editor
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it's personal
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Interesting story, but some inaccuracies
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The descriptions she gave of life and the people there (many of whom l knew) were mostly accurate. The errors were minor and did not effect the story. The only thing that bothered me was the negative tone of her story. I don’t attribute it to China Lake but to the angst of growing up into early adulthood.
I loved it!
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loved it
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Expect to learn about missiles?
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