Screwed Pooch

It was a good book. Everyone had a point of view, and it provided a good insight. However. there was one flaw in the story... While it was apparant that the author did her reasearch, she forgot one thing - THE FREAKIN PERSONALITY OF THE MAIN CHARACTER. I gave up reading it because as a Laika fan, It was painful to read.According to many resources, the "i hate the world" mentality in this version of Laika wasn't part of the real dog. In fact, it is believed that she was an docile little one, loyal and trusting. This laika also has an ego that was very apparent in chapter 3, while guess what? DOGS DON'T UNDERSTAND MIRRORS. Nor was Laika a sour, sulking pessimist! Get the facts right! My image of Laika, innocent, naive, patient, little curly tail, was just smacked in the face. Laika was the most patient and docile of the bunch!She was no Katniss Everdeen, she wasn't defiant. She enjoyed everything, acording to reports. Look at her eyes. Do those look distrustful and angry? No, I see an innocent little puppy-at-heart who is as loyal as Buck from "Call of the Wild". And it is well known that on the flight on the sputnik 2, Laika wasn't as calm as she was in here. Her poor little heart was beating three times as fast as normal, and she died in agony, being baked to death. If you want to read a more true to character story, read the graphic novel Laika by Nick Abadzis. Laika's and Albania's personalities seem to switch, and our heroine's charming innocence makes the reader feel for our little angel. This book is just like when my LA teacher modernized the story of Orphius: exept the fact that Laika is REAL, making it alot worse.So basically, this book exels as a story and novel, but NOT as a biography.

On 3 November 2007 the 50th anniversary of a historically monumental event passed virtually unnoticed by the entire world. On that date in 1957, a small mixed breed dog taken in from the mean, cold streets of Moscow was sent into orbit around the Earth in a Soviet satellite named Sputnik-2. The small mongrel, later known to the whole world as `Laika', was the first living creature to be sent into true space. Although a number of other dogs, mice, and monkeys had been sent into sub-orbital ballistic flights on short parabolic arcs into Earth's higher atmosphere prior to her flight, Laika had the historical distinction of being the earliest voyager sent on a prolonged space flight around the planet in the Earth's first artificial `moon'.Although this event has often been compared by space historians in its significance to the Wright Brothers' first (controlled, powered, heavier-than-air) flight in 1903, and pointed out as being as historically significant as, say, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or the dropping of the world's first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, over the past 50 years since Laika's orbital flight the world has gradually all but forgotten about this early canine space pioneer. Sadly, not just this event has become submerged in the turbulent tides of recent history, but in fact virtually the entire epochal history of the US-Soviet race to land a man on the moon that resulted from Laika's flight.Attribute this historical obliviousness to whatever influence you will. My favorite theory is that as generations of Americans have grown, since that time in the mid-50s, to become slavishly addicted to a life of material luxury undreamt of in earlier centuries, that surfeit of sensory excess has caused them to cease exercising even the smallest vestige of intelligent reflection on the quality of their lives....or the antecedent historical events that have brought them into being. For whatever reason, the story of Laika's ascent into the heavens on 3 November 1957 has apparently fallen victim to the overall, total lack of any sense of history possessed by the average American today. No small tragedy in itself, it is further proof of philosopher George Santayana's famous quote that "...those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."Writer, cinematographer, San Francisco State University professor, and creative thinker Jan Millsapps has recently taken pains to help rectify that gross obliviousness that characterises American historical awareness with the publication of a brilliantly imaginative fictional account of Laika, the small space dog passenger in Sputnik-2. Although a work of fiction, the book has been based upon meticulous research of the factual basis of the actual event. But perhaps just as importantly, Jan has managed to give the small dog known as Laika a personality that resonates radiently wise, female empathy. Laika, of course, was a female dog--a gender chosen deliberately for these pioneering bio-research space flights for reasons of hygienic convenience.The story Jan has created is at once both melancholy and inspiring, for in addition to creating an illuminating account of the circumstances leading up to the orbital flight of Sputnik-2, she has managed to strike a subtle parallel to the importance of the female of the species (any species) in the furtherance and nurturance processes of all life on our planet. In a world dominated by the male gender, Jan has managed, in the telling of this wonderfully poignant story, to deftly highlight the important matriarchal heritage of all living species on the Earth.As an old Berkeley radical of the 60s, who took my place next to Mario Savio in the gloriously youthful protests against the Vietnam War, I am quite well versed in that male-filtered and defined understanding of reality we characterise as `male chauvinism'. That fact notwithstanding, in the passage of years and due in no small part to the benefit of maturity, I have come also to realise that for all our vaunted male physical strength and proudly aggressive self-regard, women are indeed the stronger and more enduring of our species. There is therefore, if one accepts that logic, little if any irony in the fact that Laika, the world's first space voyager was not just a dog, but a FEMALE dog!A fact not substantively explored in the book is that the name `Laika' has a somewhat broad meaning in Russia. Translating roughly into `barker' in the common Russian idiom, the West Siberian Laika is also a specific breed of dog native to Russia that bears startling resemblance to the Siberian Husky most of us are familiar with. The term `laika' was also used occasionally to refer to all dogs in general throughout Russia, due to this fact; thus space pioneer Laika's name was itself a rather complex blend of allusive nuances, just as her unique achievement of being the first living creature in space has acquired a complex historical regard.Tragically, Laika's flight was conceived as a one-way voyage into orbit, with no plan for safe recovery of her capsule. In the end, and after many years had passed, it was admitted by the Russian scientists who had launched her that very little if any hard scientific advances had been achieved through her sacrifice. Laika remains the only dog (or in fact living animal) deliberately sacrificed for purely Cold War propaganda purposes by the USSR.In creating this fictional story of Laika (and in so doing, recreating the factual basis of the event), Jan has managed to reach out to all of us on a highly empathetic level. For those of us who as children watched Laika's artificial star traverse the skies on that cold, clear November day, 50 years ago, this is an even more important book. Despite the 50th anniversary of Laika's famous flight having been almost entirely overlooked by our modern news media, Jan's work joins a small number of books on this subject of exceptional merit (such as Nick Abadzis' graphic novel, titled `Laika'). Together, they succeed in providing much important background context for understanding of the subsequent `Space Race' to land the first man on the moon (see below for a list of suggested books for further reading).There is an old chestnut of a French saying (among many) that I am fond of: `Churchez la femme'. The expression was first coined by Alexandre Dumas in 'Le Monte-Cristo' (1857) and it had a rather aspersive context (suggesting that behind every awkward or untoward oucome of male interactions, there was likely to be found a woman). In the century and a half since Dumas inserted that phrase into the English repertoire of sophisticates, our collective social regard for women has changed substantially. In light of this, I would suggest a new meaning for the phrase: `Behind every event of substance and underlying every advance in the humane affairs of humankind, look for the woman!' This was certainly the case with regard to the little female dog that courageously led the rest of our world into the true dawn of the modern `space age', with her memorable flight into history on 3 November 1957.OTHER SUGGESTED BOOKS FOR FURTHER READING:`A Ball, A Dog, and a Monkey', by Michael D'Antonio, ISBN 13: 978-0-7432-9431-7, ISBN 10: 0-7432-9431-9, 2007.`Laika', by Nick Abadzis, ISBN 13: 978-59643-302-1, ISBN 10: 1-59643-302-7, 2007`Epic Rivalry: The Inside Story of the Soviet and American Space race', by Von Hardesty and Gene Eisman, ISBN 978-1-4262-0119-6, 2007`Countdown: A History of Space Flight' by T.A. Heppenheimer, ISBN 0-471-14439-8, 1997

I thoroughly enjoyed this fast-paced tale based upon Soviet space history, specifically their sending a dog into space. It is partly told in first person (actually first dog) and in third person as we watch the Soviet dog trainer, the woman whose pet is dognapped, and others caught in the web of Soviet space determination. Millsapps created a loveable dog, delusionally optimistic throughout her ordeal. Short chapters and great writing make this the perfect book to take on a trip.

Tim Mclain gave me this book and told me it was wriiten by a woman from Concord, N.C., my home town. I started reading it and could not put it down. I was born in 1955 and grew up during the cold war. So I am very interested in the Russian Space exploits and this particular time in history. I liked the book and highly recommend it. The thing that bothered me the most about the whole project was that the Russians had no intention of returning the poor space dog to Earth. I believe this upset the whole world. Bruce Howard

I picked up a copy of this book and am in the middle of reading it. It's a fictional novel based on real events in the Soviet Union's space program and opens with the success of Sputnik I. I loved the setting of the Kremlin celebration party with boasting and deal making laced with plenty of vodka. At the party a deal is made to send up another Sputnik in one month, this time with a canine passenger, to show the world Kremlin's might. All that juxtaposed against a starving little dog in the Moscow streets - and a female dog at that! And the dog is our narrator! Great POV! It seems funny and yet political, feminist and a little sad as well. I want to read more.

Millsapps' Screwed Pooch is an excellent blending of history, science, and domestic intrigue. Lots of "Wow!" moments. Interesting to know what the KGB and ordinary Russians may have been up to while schoolkids in the West were diving under their desks. Laika has her say and is a true heroine. Millsapps tells a great tale.