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    Unavailable
    A Girl's Guide to Missiles: Growing Up in America's Secret Desert
    Unavailable
    A Girl's Guide to Missiles: Growing Up in America's Secret Desert
    Unavailable
    A Girl's Guide to Missiles: Growing Up in America's Secret Desert
    Audiobook10 hours

    A Girl's Guide to Missiles: Growing Up in America's Secret Desert

    Written by Karen Piper

    Narrated by Rebecca Lowman

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A poignant, surreal, and fearlessly honest look at growing up on one of the most secretive weapons installations on earth, by a young woman who came of age with missiles

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 14, 2018
    ISBN9781524755881
    Unavailable
    A Girl's Guide to Missiles: Growing Up in America's Secret Desert
    Author

    Karen Piper

    Karen Piper is Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Missouri-Columbia and author of Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity. She lives in Columbia, Missouri.

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    Reviews for A Girl's Guide to Missiles

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    • 4/5
      I was unfamiliar with the name China Lake prior to reading this memoir and now I can place it in the chronology of WWII and the Cold War. Recounting her family's experiences working for the military facility at China Lake, Karen Piper also provides a brief history of the Cold War and how the creation and stockpiling of weapons impacted her own family. The story goes right up to today, with the author exploring how the enemies have changed in America's wars, but the weapons have evolved much more slowly. This memoir manages to both capture something from the spirit of the past and yet be timely for today.