Rocket Dreams

Benjamin, Marina

Vintage

As we approach the year 2000 why have millenarian groups flourished?  A study of why, throughout recorded history, various religious groups have felt the need for apocalyptic readings of history.  What is it about modern life that makes such views widespread in an allegedly rational age where  science and technology reign supreme?

Living at the End of the World

History

World

MACMILLAN PUB. LTD.

In this study, the author asks why, throughout recorded history, have various religious groups felt the need for apocalyptic readings of history. The book ranges from the growth of the Mormons to the practice of cryonics.

Parenting & Relationships

Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Chatto and Windus

A cultural legacy of post-Apollo America identifies societal beliefs and factors that contributed to a decline in enthusiasm for the space program, profiling key figures in rocketry, space travel, cyberspace, and other developments.

Americas

Free Press

Remember when the race to the moon held the rapt attention of millions? Remember the Apollo missions that were supposed to herald the beginning of the Space Age? Thirty years after the last moonwalk, those missions now appear to have ushered in an era's conclusion. What happened? Marina Benjamin has been asking that question ever since her childhood fascination with space exploration ended in disappointment. Rocket Dreams is her thought-provoking look at the Space Age and the shadow it casts on the fabric of our modern lives. When the futuristic expectations we pinned on Apollo came crashing back to earth, Benjamin argues, new phenomena took up the cause. Pulling movies, literature, junk culture, and the Internet into an irreverent alternative account of the post-Apollo years, she links the demise of the Space Age to groups like the "church" of Noetics -- founded by astronaut Edgar Mitchell -- to the spread of UFO believers, even to the birth of fantasy literature. Propelling us through the golden age of Space Age-dreaming during the seventies and eighties, Benjamin finally touches down on...the Web. Has cyberspace become the new frontier we once thought outer space would be? From Florida's overgrown rocket graveyards to Roswell, New Mexico, and beyond, this skillful blend of history and social observation examines the rise and fall of America's space obsession as never before.

Draws on the experiences of the author's own family to chronicle the odyssey and ultimate exile of Jewish Iraqis, documenting how Jewish citizens in Baghdad deteriorated from the region's largest and most prosperous ethnic group to a band of a few dozen survivors under the oppression of a hostile Iraqi government. By the author of Rocket Dreams. 35,000 first printing.

Last Days in Babylon: The History of a Family, the Story of a Nation

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Marina Benjamin grew up in London feeling estranged from her family's exotic Middle Eastern ways. She refused to speak the Arabic her mother and grandmother spoke at home. She rejected the peculiar food they ate in favor of hamburgers and beer. But when Benjamin had her own child a few years ago, she realized that she was losing her link to the past. In Last Days in Babylon, Benjamin delves into the story of her family's life among the Jews of Iraq in the first half of the twentieth century. When Iraq gained independence in 1932, Jews were the largest and most prosperous ethnic group in Baghdad. They dominated trade and finance, hobnobbed with Iraqi dignitaries, and lived in grandiose villas on the banks of the Tigris. Just twenty years later the community had been utterly ravaged, its members effectively expelled from the country by a hostile Iraqi government. Benjamin's grandmother Regina Sehayek lived through it all. Born in 1905, when Baghdad was still under Ottoman control, her childhood was a virtual idyll. This privileged existence was barely touched when the British marched into Iraq. But with the rise of Arab nationalism and the first stirrings of anti-Zionism, Regina, then a young mother, began to have dark premonitions of what was to come. By the time Iraq was galvanized by war, revolution, and regicide, Regina was already gone, her hair-raising escape a tragic exodus from a land she loved - and a permanent departure from the husband whose gentle guiding hand had made her the woman she was. Benjamin's keen ear and fluid writing bring to life Regina's Baghdad, both good and bad. More than a stirring story of survival, Last Days in Babylon is a bittersweet portrait of Old World Baghdad and its colorful Jewish community, whose roots predate the birth of Islam by a thousand years and whose culture did much to make Iraq the peaceful desert paradise that has since become a distant memory.

Last Days in Babylon: The Exile of Iraq's Jews, the Story of My Family

Insomnia (Thorndike Press Large Print Biographies and Memoirs)

Thorndike Press Large Print

Insomnia

Medical Books

Psychology

Scribe Publications

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Books by Benjamin, Marina