Whitcoulls Recommends: Atmosphere and Inside the Wire

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid, who is well known for terrific books like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and Daisy Jones and The Six. In 1980, Joan Goodwin becomes one of the first women scientists accepted by NASA for the space shuttle programme where she’s part of a close team who work and play together. Vanessa Ford is a brilliant, practical aeronautical engineer and they discover possibilities in their friendship they never knew existed - so when Vanessa’s mission goes badly wrong and Joan, in charge of astronaut communications is responsible for bringing her safely back to earth, the tension and emotion is off the chart. As were mine. 

Inside the Wire by Rhonda Hapi – Smith. Rhonda spent almost 20 years as a prison officer in a number of men’s prisons around the country. She’s a tough, physically strong woman - she also worked on the Riot Squad - with a hefty dose of compassion who always understood that in order to get the best out of the people in her care she needed to build relationships but take no nonsense. The book is an insight into life inside the prison walls, both for the incarcerated men and for the staff, and it comes from a career of which she is justifiably proud. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Ab Jo McKenzie joins me, Now, good morning.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Hello.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Okay, I know a lot of people are going to
be very excited that Taylor Jenkins Read has a new
book out. I'm going to be honest, I haven't read
the books, but I did love the TV show.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
Well, I am one of them who's very excited. Good.
A lot of listeners will know her from possibly her
most famous book, which is called The Seven Husbands of
Evelyn Hugo, which has been actually on the Wickles Top
one hundred for the last several years, and as you say,
Daisy Jones and the sixth and the new one is
called Atmosphere, and it is completely different. One of the
clever things that she's done in some of her earlier

(00:47):
books is she has characters who are in one of
them who turn up as kind of a side interest
in another of them, so you'll get the links between
the stories. This is not one of those. It's a
standalone and it's set in nineteen eighty when NASA opened
its Space Shuttle program to women, and the lead character
is a woman called Joan great name. Her name's Joan Goodwin.

(01:08):
And in the story, she becomes part of a team
men and women who work together incredibly closely, a very
closely knit team, and they work and they play together,
and within that group, she meets a woman called Vanessa Ford,
who's a really brilliant I think she's an aeronautical engineer,
really clever mind, and an interesting woman. And they develop

(01:31):
a very deep friendship and they discover possibilities within that
friendship that had never occurred to them before, and they
become extremely close. And Vanessa is sent on her mission
into space, and so up she goes, and Joan is
back at mission control, and for this particular flight, her
job is being responsible for all of the communications with

(01:51):
the astronauts. She's the only person on the ground who's
allowed to talk to them while they're on their mission,
so everything has to go through her. And something goes
terribly badly wrong with the mission. And here she is
trying to be professional and to bring her her friend
safely back to Earth with her team and listen to
everything whose superiors are telling her and trying to communicate

(02:14):
to her, and deciding whether or not she's going to
do the right Thing by Nasa, or Whether She's going
to do the Right Thing by Vanessa. It's really taught
and really well done. And I was reading this in
a cafe waiting for a friend to turn up, and
luckily for everybody there, they arrived just at the point
where I was about to start howling. Okay, but I

(02:37):
love this for the time period that it was set in,
for the landscape, these characters that it's like she does
with her books. She does it so well.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Oh brilliant. Tell me about Inside the Wire.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
This is by a New Zealand woman, Ronda Harpy Smith,
who was a prison officer for around twenty years. She
started her career down in Hawke's Bay at the Mangarore
Prison and in order to become a prison officer, certainly
at that time I'm not sure about now, you had
to go through a six week training course. So she
went to college to learn how to do this job.

(03:09):
And she comes across as tough, really tough physically, very strong,
but obviously I think you'd probably have to be. She
did almost all of her work in men's prisons, but
she's also deeply compassionate and I really loved the way
in this book that she doesn't judge anybody. She's there
to do a job, and she's there to do it
to the very best of her ability, and in fact

(03:30):
to help these people try and become better people. She
often found herself in situations that certainly I could not
ever imagine being in. But she really understood the power
of relationships, and she worked really hard to keep the
prisoners safe, and she worked with them rather than against them,
and verbally boys she could give as good as she got.

(03:54):
She wasn't only a prison officer, but she was also
a member of the riot squad, and some of the
fights and things that she talks about where they have
lines of offices in the front line will be holding
up the riot shields, and then there'll be people like
her who are the qualified riot squad people in the
next line going in against these hardened criminals. The Manga
are a prison where she worked, was largely I believe

(04:16):
mongrel mob and black power.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Right, So this is a true Insiders. It's really a
reality of life in prison, really is.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
And she's very interesting. She did a short stint in
a women's prison. She didn't enjoy that because she said
the emotional mind games that imprisoned women can play. Made
it really hard. She preferred the physical nature of it.
She talks about what she calls the rats, who are
the prison officers who are corrupt and will provide things
to the prisoners that they never should do. It's a

(04:45):
very interesting, as you say, insight into what that world
is like.

Speaker 2 (04:48):
Oh it sounds fascinating. That was Inside the Wire by
Rhonda Harpy Smith and also Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins. Read
Thanks so much, Jiant. We'll talk next week for thea.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
Then for more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin,
Listen live to News Talks there'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio