A brisk narrative, deft anecdotes, and abundant illustrations enliven a well-researched history.
In an informative companion book to the PBS miniseries of the same name, documentary filmmaker Stone, the program’s writer, producer, and director, and Andres, a consulting producer and researcher on the series, chronicle the quest for space travel that culminated in Neil Armstrong’s first step on the lunar surface.
As the authors reveal, the journey to the moon did not begin with John F. Kennedy’s commitment to a moon landing by the end of the 1960s but more than half a century earlier, in “agrarian czarist Russia,” where “a popular spiritual philosophy called cosmism” posited space travel as “the ultimate liberation” from “the shackles of Earth’s gravity” and into a realm where “all humanity would partake in cosmic immortality.” In the decades that followed, space travel piqued the public’s imagination: Science fiction magazines, novels, and movies found an eager audience, and interplanetary societies began in America and the U.K. By 1950, Arthur C. Clarke became a popular spokesman for, and writer about, interplanetary flight, so well-known that in 1964, when director Stanley Kubrick planned “an ambitious, optimistic epic about humanity’s destiny in space,” he called on Clarke as a collaborator; 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, to great acclaim, a few years later. The authors profile other major figures who influenced America’s space program throughout the 1950s and ’60s: charismatic German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun and his mentor Willy Ley, who became part of “America’s new German brain trust”; NASA head James Webb, who advocated for government support even in the face of skeptical congressmen; newscaster Edward R. Murrow, who repeatedly pressed for integrating the astronaut corps; Poppy Northcutt, the first female flight controller; and the teams of astronauts who manned the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo crews. The authors re-create in breathtaking detail the launch of Apollo 11 and Armstrong’s calm announcement four days later: “The Eagle has landed.”
A brisk narrative, deft anecdotes, and abundant illustrations enliven a well-researched history.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9812-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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