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`Barbie' author investigates NASA's jet lab
M.G. Lord, a witty and impressively wise cultural critic, wrote a hilarious and poignant biography of Barbie, the doll most baby boomers grew up with.
Lord has turned her life over to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., having spent five years probing the cultural history of a science so profoundly fantastic that it seems to be the stuff of dreams.
The story Lord unearthed is as compelling as the bizarre life she chronicled of America's plastic icon, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, (William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1994).
"The history of JPL is riveting and I think it's really a story of America," said Lord by phone from Los Angeles, where she's finishing her second book, Astroturf, which Simon & Schuster expects to publish in 2001.
"It's the story of how the boys of 1936 setting off their toy rockets in the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena, Calif., evolved into the girls of 1999 landing their Deep Space 2 Probes on the surface of Mars," Lord said.
Lord will be in Santa Fe to talk about her book-in-progress as well as the Barbie phenomenon at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 30, at SITE Santa Fe, as part of the museum's Art & Culture lecture series.
The lecture coincides with the Dec. 3 target of the landing on Mars of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Deep Space 2 Probes.
Lord, a Yale graduate and investigative journalist who has written for The New Yorker, ArtForum, The New York Times, Vanity Fair and other prominent publications, grew up in La Jolla, Calif., in the...