Description:
A deep launch into the memory and history of the real pioneers of American spaceflight--monkeys Able, Baker, Ham, and Enos. This book explores how these nonhuman astronauts are remembered in the media and exhibited in museums. Space Monkeys! exposes how emotion, memory, and national pride shape the stories we tell about science, animals, and the history of the "race to space."
Review Quotes:
"Lynch gathers together and analyzes a little-known and historically significant archive. Scholars of rhetoric, animal studies, bioethics, and space exploration alike will find Space Monkeys! both exhilarating and enlightening." --Joshua Trey Barnett, author of Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence
"Space Monkeys! is an engagingly written book." --Greg Dickinson, PhD, professor at Colorado State University
"By putting primate astronauts at the center, Lynch offers something truly remarkable: a new story about the US space program. Tragic, comic, and profound, Space Monkeys! offers a significant contribution to rhetorical history, public memory, and our understanding of humanity's affective and ethical relations with the nonhuman world." --Jenell Johnson, author of Every Living Thing: The Politics of Life in Common