This book review was originally posted to my ko-fi page.
Science - 🔬🔬🔬
Difficulty- 📖 📖
Target Audience - Young Adults (Gen Y) and Adults (Gen X & Boomers)
In a sentence? Laura shares Gen Y's space beliefs nearly verbatim to their interviews.
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I was excited for this book for so long. Laura Forczyk self-published "Rise of the Space-Age Millennials: The Space Aspirations of a Rising Generation," a book that promised the Gen Y perspective of the space industry from those young professionals in the field.
I didn't help kickstart it but set aside funds to buy it when available. I brought it to my brother's graduation ceremony in hopes of finishing it in that 3 hours of time (he had a very large class).
If I had a favorite part, it's the introduction. Forcyzk details how she wrote the book and the logic of the chapters and poses the challenge that if someone can do it better, she'll support them in doing so.
I could write a better book.
What this book lacks is real analysis. There is no demographic information about who we are talking to beyond the title "Space Age Millennials." Forcyzk doesn't go further than sharing what an interviewee said for all 100 individuals.
It's not to Forcyzk's fault. She's not a social scientist by training, as she admitted. She's an astrophysicist. This book is chapters of paragraphs summarizing the interviewee's beliefs and thoughts with very little analysis. At the end of a chapter, Forcyzk shares her thoughts and experiences (as a millennial), then about three paragraphs of analysis.
After about three chapters, I couldn't finish appreciating the read for what it is: a first step in research to the modern space age. I anticipate reading it in the fall to help provide some qualitative elements to my thesis. But this book is just a series of interviews, I'll have to provide all the analysis myself.
The world needed this book, and it's an excellent first step and conversation piece. I hope to build on what Forcyzk attempted to do. If you want to read young professionals' beliefs about the space age one-by-one to draw your conclusions, be my guest. Beyond researchers, I don't know who would.
