Word: ackmann
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...Service Pilots) as well as the women's air-racing circuit, the Powder Puff Derby. The tests were to assess their fitness as potential astronauts. The remarkable story of how these women got to the Bird of Paradise Motel and what happened to them afterward is documented in Martha Ackmann's The Mercury 13 (Random House; 239 pages...
...rigorous physical and psychological evaluations that the men of the Mercury program had undergone and that Tom Wolfe chronicled in The Right Stuff: Exercycle workouts, X rays, enemas, body-mass calculations, a sensory-isolation tank, even an enunciation test. The trials narrowed the field of women to 13--hence Ackmann's title--and to everybody's surprise but their own, the women performed at the same level...
...writer, Ackmann is no Tom Wolfe. Her prose sometimes lapses into academic dryness (she's a lecturer in women's studies at Mount Holyoke), but the pathos of the stories she tells wins through. Mercury 13 is a revealing snapshot of a country simultaneously caught up in the romance of the future and snarled in the prejudice of the past. --By Lev Grossman
...Martha Ackmann is a women's studies professor at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts...
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