“Sally Ride”
Lynn Sherr
Simon & Schuster, $28
I’m going to come clean. The last time space flight held my attention was on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 touched down on the moon. In the decades since, I have been more aware of NASA’s failings: the aborted Challenger launch in 1986 that killed, among others, a social studies teacher. Or the terrible re-entry of the Columbia in 2003 that took the lives of seven astronauts. If we’re not finding intelligent life on Mars, I thought, who cares?