Reddit mentions of Laika

In a rather different vein from a lot of the suggestions I'm seeing here, I want to plug Michael Herr's Dispatches as an incredible piece of Vietnam literature. There's also If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O'Brien.

If you're willing to consider graphic novels, check out Maus, Persepolis, and Laika.

If you're interested at all in vampires and folklore, I recommend Food for the Dead. Really interesting read.

A history-teacher friend of mine recently gave me The Lost City of Z by David Grann. I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but it came highly recommended.

By the by, last year I required my students (high school seniors) to select and read a non-fiction book and gave them the following list of suggestions. Columbine was one of the really popular ones, and I had a bunch of kids (and a few teachers) recommending it to me, but, again, I haven't gotten to it yet.

• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steve D. Levitt
  
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
  
• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
  
• The Omnivore’s Dilemna: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
  
• Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser
  
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
  
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
  
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
  
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
  
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
  
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss
  
• In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan
  
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
  
• The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
  
• Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach
  
• A Brief History of Time: The Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition by Stephen Hawking
  
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
  
• The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman
  
• Columbine by Dave Cullen
  
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
  
• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen
  
• The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
  
• The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story by Richard Preston
  
• Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach
  
• SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt
  
• Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach
  
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Emil Frankl
  
• At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
  
• Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
  
• Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
  
• The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got that Way by Bill Bryson
  
• Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry
  
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
  
• The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
  
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
  
• Food For the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires by Michael E. Bell
  
• Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha
  
• Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation by Cokie Roberts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika

Laika https://www.amazon.com/dp/1596431016/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_tR07AbH7K6FZ8

Have you thought about using a graphic novel? They're quicker to read and might appeal to students who aren't as engaged with regular novels. My English teacher friend teaches American Born Chinese as part of her seventh grade curriculum; I don't know if it would be accessible to sixth or not. I also found Laika - about the dog who was the first animal in space - to be a good, thought-provoking graphic novel, and it could lead to some very engaged discussions in the classroom.

LIST INCOMING:

I'm so in love with this range of books: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Botanicum-Welcome-Museum-Kathy-Willis/dp/1783703946

I guess they're kids books but the illustrations are just beautiful and I actually got the postcard set for the botanical illustrations, and I'm going to have them framed for my house. I adore plant illustrations in this style.

Another one I love is: https://www.amazon.com/Resurrectionist-Lost-Work-Spencer-Black/dp/1594746168

The story is a bit average but the illustrations are so cool, I love anatomical illustrations and mythical beasts.

These two are also amazing: https://www.amazon.com/Where-Why-How-Illustrate-Mysteries/dp/1452108226 and https://www.amazon.com/Who-What-When-Illustrate-Sidekicks/dp/1452128278/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1452128278&pd_rd_r=RRYE5GWH9BWS2TPVV31X&pd_rd_w=K7qR6&pd_rd_wg=Mxunj&psc=1&refRID=RRYE5GWH9BWS2TPVV31X

I totally cried my eyes out over this one: https://www.amazon.com/Radioactive-Marie-Pierre-Curie-Fallout/dp/0061351326

And the illustrations are just so beautiful. Her story is just tragic and she was so brilliant.

If you wanna cry for a couple of years, this one: https://www.amazon.com/Laika-Nick-Abadzis/dp/1596431016

I guess not strictly about the science but there's a good amount of space related information and science tangential stuff, and its just such a beautiful book that I couldn't not recommend it. The final page is basically seared onto my memory forever :c

I'm utterly obsessed with this book: https://www.amazon.com/Sick-Rose-Disease-Medical-Illustration/dp/1938922409

ITS SO INTERESTING, its mostly medical diagrams and descriptions (I obviously have an aesthetic).

Here's a link to it on Amazon


*edit also here is Nick Abadzis website about Laika.

You might enjoy this graphic novel about Laika. It has some fictionalized aspects, but is well-researched for the parts that we can know. Really puts a face (or shall we say a wagging tail?) on the story.

https://www.amazon.com/Laika-Nick-Abadzis/dp/1596431016

Reading Laika whilst drunk.

Pretty sure there's a Laika graphic novel. I haven't read it but I heard it's good.

Here it do:

http://www.amazon.com/Laika-Nick-Abadzis/dp/1596431016

This could be a very long list ... Will try to reign it in to some of my favourites. Most are popular enough that they won’t need explaining.

Springtime In Chernobyl

The Handmaid’s Tale: A Graphic Novel

Maus

Laika

Ichi-F: A Worker's Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant


Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation

To Kill A Mockingbird: A Graphic Novel

Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare Classics Graphic Novels)

The Hobbit Graphic Novel

Persepolis

The Kite Runner: A Graphic Novel

A Wrinkle In Time: A Graphic Novel

The Great Successor Kim Jong Un: a Political Cartoon, an Epic Comic of the Dark Kingdom and the Passing of Power to a Third Kim

Any of Guy Delisle’s travelogues

As the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight approaches I've been reading about Laika, the first earthling in space. She was shot into space on November 7, 1957 with no plan for retrieval. She lived for about six hours. I didn't know much about her story until I heard this song at PAXEast. After that I looked her up on Wikipedia. My wife also found a graphic novel about her, and about the soviet space program in general at the time called Laika, by Nick Abadzis which I haven't read all the way through yet.

Laika's story is heartbreaking and it should be remembered. JoCo's tribute is really great. Give it a listen.

People should read the graphic novel by Nick Abadzis: https://www.amazon.ca/Laika-Nick-Abadzis/dp/1596431016
So sad and beautiful all at once. But mostly sad, tbh.

This submission's headline reminds me of this awesome comic book, but I see nothing about canines or dogs in the submission itself. The link appears to redirect to here.

Laika! Not Soviet in origin, but a great story of the USSR.