A Girl's Guide to Missiles
Growing Up in America's Secret Desert
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Piper (The Price of Thirst) chronicles her coming-of-age in this affecting memoir about growing up in the 1970s on a naval missile testing base in California's Mojave Desert. When her father, a WWII veteran, suddenly lost his job as an aerospace engineer at Boeing, he moved his wife and two daughters to Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, where he landed a job after six months. Throughout Piper's charming narrative looms the threat of nuclear war, Watergate, and concerns about UFOs. "I grew up in the age of missiles, which are essentially rockets with brains," she writes. As a youth Piper embraced her Christian upbringing and insisted she attend the Immanuel Christian middle school; in high school she embraced the Reaganite iteration of "Make American Great Again." Later, she questioned her faith and examined China Lake's history, including the prominent and underappreciated role women played on the missile base working alongside their male counterparts. She eventually attended graduate school in Eugene, Ore., where she took classes in literature and feminism, and left the Republican Party. This is a fascinating look at growing up in Cold War America, as told by a sharp and affable narrator.