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

by Karen Piper Narrated by Rebecca Lowman

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile

Karen Piper’s fascinating memoir is brought skillfully to life by Rebecca Lowman’s intimate narration. Piper recounts her Cold War-era childhood and adolescence at the naval research facility at China Lake, California, where both of her parents worked on missile development. She weaves military, political, and cultural history with important moments in her own life—Reagan's election and her sixteenth birthday, for example. Lowman maintains an easy, natural tone, drawing the listener along as the subject matter veers from missile science to Piper’s slow discovery of the world outside China Lake. The author reflects on her unusual childhood with a refreshing lack of judgment, and Lowman’s narration captures both her dry humor and her generous but frank assessment of herself and her family. E.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

04/23/2018
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. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

Karen Piper's A Girl's Guide To Missiles reaches back into the body of American war and retrieves the heart of a girl, still beating, not beaten. Her memoir riveted me—I read it in one sitting holding my breath as she made a story braid from growing up a girl and growing up in the military industrial complex at the China Lake missile range. Gender, family, war, and American myth-making make this an unforgettable book and a radical act of truth-telling.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Chronology of Water
 
“Karen Piper lived the escalating levels of insanity of the cold war from the inside, playing her girlhood games in the top secret labs and working beside her parents in a hidden corner of the Mojave. The bombs of tomorrow were a family affair, and the truth was always tricky.  For Piper, who writes like a dream, failed test shots mirror busted romances, and the excesses of the era eventually lead our missile girl to communal life in a bomb-proof Oregon. A Girl’s Guide to Missiles is a family portrait, a missile-science primer, a coming of nuclear age. Piper captures the soul of an era that might not be so long gone as we would hope.” –Bill Roorbach, author of Life Among Giants, The Remedy for Love, and The Girl of the Lake

“Brilliantly overdetermined setup, one that yields both black comedy and sickening lurches of insight.” — Harper's

“[A] fascinating memoir . . . [Piper] offers an incredible view of a little-known community, from WWII all the way through 9/11, and examines how her family navigated life in a town built for war.” —Booklist

OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile

Karen Piper’s fascinating memoir is brought skillfully to life by Rebecca Lowman’s intimate narration. Piper recounts her Cold War-era childhood and adolescence at the naval research facility at China Lake, California, where both of her parents worked on missile development. She weaves military, political, and cultural history with important moments in her own life—Reagan's election and her sixteenth birthday, for example. Lowman maintains an easy, natural tone, drawing the listener along as the subject matter veers from missile science to Piper’s slow discovery of the world outside China Lake. The author reflects on her unusual childhood with a refreshing lack of judgment, and Lowman’s narration captures both her dry humor and her generous but frank assessment of herself and her family. E.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2018-05-15
A smart, self-aware memoir of life in a Cold War outpost.If you're a government agency, there are three reasons to hide your activities from public view: because they really need to be kept secret, because the activities are fundamentally useless, or because "you want to rip the money bag open and get out a shovel, because there is no accountability whatsoever." So an official told Piper (Literature and Geography/Univ. of Missouri; The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos, 2014, etc.) in what amounts to a mantra for all of China Lake, a test facility in the hottest, most forbidding part of the Mojave Desert. The author writes of a childhood spent in a household headed by two project workers at China Lake. It was a world of missiles and launches and secrets in a time when the world seemed to be falling to bits—there was Vietnam, for one thing, and then the Manson family zipping around in the nearby desert in their dune buggies ("The Mansons even shopped at our 7-Eleven in Ridgecrest, where Christine and I bought our candy"). By Piper's account, it was a preternaturally strange place in a strange time punctuated by Amway rallies and enlivened with unhealthy spats of interoffice politics. But interesting things happened there, too, including experiments to turn the weather into a weapon, to say nothing of the business of turning hardscrabble China Lake, a place of prewar brothels and hermits, into a place suitable for straight-arrow military personnel, civilian contractors, and their families. Piper's account moves among the personal and the universal, with fine small coming-of-age moments. The narrative threatens to unravel a little when, following her father's death, Piper acts on clues he left behind to follow his footsteps in other arenas of the Cold War, but she pulls everything into an effective—and affecting—whole meant to "ensure that history was not erased."A little-known corner of the Atomic Age comes into focus through Piper's skilled storytelling.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172053016
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/14/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "A Girl's Guide to Missiles"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Karen Piper.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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