New York Times book reviews of note...
Jul. 13th, 2009 11:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Giant Step, Full Stop
By THOMAS MALLON, The New York Times, July 12, 2009
(ROCKET MEN: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, By Craig Nelson, Illustrated. 404 pp. Viking. $27.95)
and
(VOICES FROM THE MOON: Apollo Astronauts Describe Their Lunar Experiences, By Andrew Chaikin with Victoria Kohl, Illustrated. 201 pp. Viking Studio. $29.95)
The story of the moon landings is an oft-told tale, but one that feels stranger with each new telling. Walter Cronkite’s prediction, that after Apollo 11 “everything else that has happened in our time is going to be an asterisk,” wound up playing out backward. In our pop-historical memory of the 1960s, Project Apollo is the footnote, an oddball offshoot from assassinations, Vietnam and Charles Manson. Since 1972, no human has traveled beyond low-Earth orbit, a situation that makes one imagine what things might be like if, after Lindbergh’s flight, the species had contentedly gone back to making do with boats and trains.
Craig Nelson’s “Rocket Men” lacks the shapeliness and authority of some earlier lunar histories, but it ends up making an engaging contribution. He sensibly sets the Apollo period against “the interminable shuttle/space station era” that followed, and before that tracks the space race against the missile race that proceeded alongside it. Soviet-American competition in space may have looked like a peaceful alternative to war — a “celestial olympics” in Nelson’s nice phrasing — but the civilian-controlled NASA retained its “military DNA.” Lyndon Johnson, who earmarked the most money for the agency, confidentially pronounced it a bargain because of the yield from spy photography made possible in part by Project Gemini: “We know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were building things we didn’t need to build.”
Johnson’s predecessor had reached the White House by denouncing a missile gap that didn’t really exist. Once he was there, John F. Kennedy embraced the goal of a moon landing after the one-two punch of Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight and the Bay of Pigs debacle, but not from any personal enthusiasm for exploration. (“I’m not that interested in space,” he told NASA officials in 1962.) Addressing the United Nations after the successful completion of Project Mercury and only two months before his death, the president expressed his willingness to see the United States go to the moon with the Soviets instead of alone. Whether, during a second term, he might have ended the space race is a matter debated among historians of NASA just as the president’s ultimate intentions about Vietnam excite those in other fields.
In the event, the speed with which the Apollo program was realized is unimaginable to anyone young enough only to have seen the manned space program shuttle only through its later elephantine circles. Kennedy’s “before this decade is out” deadline for a lunar landing wasn’t pushed back, even after the Apollo 1 ground fire of 1967, which killed three astronauts and created an 18-month gap between manned missions. During that period, Nelson writes, “the entire agency would be re-engineered.” The tightly wound Frank Borman, commander of Apollo 8, recalls the atmosphere after the fire: “People got to drinking too much, taking uppers and downers, and the damn doctors were handing out stuff so that people could go to sleep and so they could wake up.” No space history — not Nelson’s, not even Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox’s 1989 volume, “Apollo,” which was oriented toward operations on the ground — has yet done this time and milieu full justice.
Nelson does make good use of NASA oral histories to amplify and adjust what one remembers of the early Apollo missions. However heavenly the voyage of Apollo 8 may have seemed — on Christmas Eve 1968, the astronauts read aloud from Genesis during their ninth orbit of the moon — Bill Anders, who flew the mission with Borman and Jim Lovell, reminds us that the cramped and vomit-stained command module felt like “an outhouse” by the time it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. The success of quiet, opaque Neil Armstrong has come to seem inevitable, but he was hardly a good-luck charm: before Apollo 11, he was nearly killed flying Gemini 8 and testing the lunar lander, and he had seen his own house in Houston burn to the ground.
On July 20, 1969, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin overshot their planned landing point and nearly ran out of fuel as they dodged boulders and false alarms from their computerized dashboard, looking for a place to come down. They made it with 17 seconds to spare. That night the Soviets’ unmanned Luna 15 spacecraft, which they hoped would scoop up rock samples and beat Apollo 11 home, crash-landed into another part of the moon, while the two Americans, having completed their walk around Tranquility Base, slept in the lunar module.
Nelson’s account of Apollo 11 fills about a quarter of the odd, modular structure he chooses for his book. He never goes for long without executing some nice writerly flourish — astronauts carrying their briefcase-shaped ventilators to the launch pad resemble “businessmen on their way to the future” — but a reader’s ears are sometimes irritated by the sound of boilerplate clanging into place (“greatest tragedies . . . astonishing triumphs”). Among Nelson’s achievements is the restoration of a certain grandeur to the moon itself, whose near-planetary status is arguable from the fact that “of 150 moons in the solar system, ours is the largest in relation to its host.”
Despite their “general lack of verbal firepower,” the moon’s astronaut explorers did their best to convey the look of the dusty world they suddenly saw in such sharp relief. (“Be descriptive!” Jan Armstrong called out to her husband’s televised form.) Some of their strongest efforts at recalling the lunar landscape can be found in “Voices From the Moon,” a new book of mission photographs and astronaut quotations compiled by Andrew Chaikin (author of “A Man on the Moon”) and Victoria Kohl.
A few of the recollections may stop you cold. Apollo 12’s Alan Bean, who later became a painter, recalls looking with wonder at Earth before having to upbraid himself: “I would say, I’ve got to quit doing this . . . because when I’m doing this, I’m not looking for rocks.” If any real scandal attaches to Project Apollo, it’s the extent to which hard science was allowed to dominate the astronauts’ hours on the moon. With less geology and more ontology, they might have kept the public fired up for further space exploration. Even Frank Borman, who became a no-nonsense C.E.O. back on Earth, realizes what the missions should really have been about: “We took the human intellect and the human vision, the human mind, 240,000 miles away from its home base. . . . Whether we found a rock there or not was of no importance.”
Nelson properly shakes his head over the long epilogue: “A mere 25 years from guided missile to man on the moon, and then . . . nothing.” Spectacular unmanned probes on the order of Galileo and Cassini, yes; but where manned spaceflight is concerned, NASA currently continues on the same irresolute and unimaginative road it has traveled since Richard Nixon’s last years in the White House. The Eagle, Armstrong and Aldrin’s delicate landing craft, returned the two astronauts to Apollo 11’s command module on July 21, 1969. The springy little machine, having done its job, was then cut loose. It fell back into lunar orbit and eventually to the moon’s surface. To this day, no one knows exactly where it is.
Thomas Mallon’s books include the novel “Aurora 7” and “Rockets and Rodeos,” a collection of essays.
Children’s Books: From Laika to the Lunar Module
By JACK SHAFER, The New York Times, July 12, 2009
(T-MINUS: The Race to the Moon, By Jim Ottaviani, Illustrated by Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon, 124 pp. Aladdin. $21.99. (Ages 8 to 12))
and
(ONE SMALL STEP: Celebrating the First Men on the Moon, By Jerry Stone, Illustrated. Unpaged. Flash Point/Roaring Brook Press. $24.95. (Ages 6 to 10))
and
(MISSION TO THE MOON: By Alan Dyer, Illustrated. 80 pp. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. $19.99. (Ages 8 to 12))
The early space race was really a chase, with the United States trailing its superpower rival — the So-viet Union — badly. The Soviets took a strong lead by tossing Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit in 1957 and smacking the moon in the face with the Luna 2 probe in 1959. Although the United States launched its first Earth satellite in 1958, its less powerful rockets had a tendency to detonate on the launch pad like short-fused bombs or break up after takeoff and sizzle like Fourth of July fireworks, or veer off course.
“T-Minus: The Race to the Moon,” a graphic novel written by Jim Ottaviani, tells the story of America’s come-from-behind victory in the space race’s main event — a manned moon landing. Ottaviani takes minimal liberties with the actual events to compress the great race into 124 pages: he deftly reimagines and expands the roles played by a few real-life aerospace engineers and contractors and imagines plausible dialogue for places where the historical record is incomplete.
The illustrations by Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon (no relation) capture both the inky vastness of space and the glory of the big flying machines, but the book’s primary subject is human emotions, not rockets or the heavens. Again and again, “T-Minus” — rocketeer lingo for time until takeoff — relies on close-ups to dramatize the life work of rocket visionaries from both nations’ space programs, like Robert Goddard, Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev. It’s about time the people who designed and built the spacecraft got top billing over the flyboys.
The Soviet Union’s first firsts were followed by still more: first to put a live animal into orbit (Laika the space dog in 1958); first to put a man into orbit (1961); first to put a woman into orbit (1963); first to conduct a space walk (1965). By the mid-1960s the Soviets owned all of the space endurance flight records, too.
The gap between the two programs seemed to widen in 1967 after Gus Grissom and his two crew mates died in a fire during a launch-pad practice session of their Apollo 1 capsule. NASA, which ran the space program, suspended Apollo flights while it made the craft safer, and President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing on the moon by the end of the 1960s appeared unreachable. But then the Soviets stumbled. Korolev, a top rocket designer, died unexpectedly during surgery in 1966, and the Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was killed during the emergency landing of the Soyuz 1. These events helped to sidetrack the Soviet program and create an opening for the Americans.
A series of successful Apollo missions in the late 1960s restored confidence at NASA and provided the steppingstones for an American moon landing. Just before Christmas 1968, in a preview of what was to come, the re-engineered Apollo 8 left Earth’s gravity and orbited the moon. “T-Minus” treats this flight to as many pages as the moon landing mission itself. In March 1969, Apollo 9 practiced docking with the lunar landing vehicle in Earth orbit; two months later Apollo 10 did the same in moon orbit; and on July 20, 1969 — 40 years ago — Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon at Tranquillity Base while Michael Collins orbited above in the mother ship that would ferry them back home.
“T-Minus” captures the optimism and courage of both countries’ space pioneers, making it an ideal entry point for new readers intrigued by the topic. Space know-it-alls will learn something, too. Who knew that the Apollo’s Saturn V launcher was delivered from Huntsville, Ala., to its Florida launch pad by barge?
This is a well-researched book. In its constellation of useful facts, dates and figures, I found just one error: it wrongly states that John Glenn’s Friendship 7 orbited the Earth in 1961. As the authors know, Glenn’s flight came in 1962.
The slickly produced “One Small Step: Celebrating the First Men on the Moon” purports to be a space-race scrapbook assembled by a young boy named Mike, who is pictured on its opening page and whose mother is a NASA scientist. Any reader inquisitive enough to enjoy “One Small Step” will quickly figure out that the annotated photos, insignias, lists, engineering diagrams and artwork taped and paper-clipped into place were assembled by the professionals listed on the book’s copyright page, none of them named Mike.
Awkward as this approach is, don’t let it keep you from appreciating “One Small Step.” The book’s scrapbook format invites readers to explore the concepts, technologies and personal stories behind manned space flight. Flaps open to chart the space race’s timeline or to explain the functioning of a piece of space hardware. A postcard with Laika the space dog begs to be peeled off the page and mailed. There’s even a detachable “First Man on the Moon” mini-pennant.
“Mission to the Moon,” by Alan Dyer, celebrating the Apollo 11 anniversary, covers much of the same area but does so with a straight documentary approach supplemented by a bonus DVD of Apollo footage (which works on a computer disk drive but not on a TV). If “One Small Step” is big fun, “Mission to the Moon” is serious fun, trusting the material instead of flaps and human drama to sustain reader interest. It should go without saying which book I’d pick to spend an evening with and which book I’d choose to add to my library.
These three books remind us of the time when the moon was a place people actually visited, a time of science fact that eclipses every volume of science fiction ever written. As any 12-year-old can tell you, the long-ago years of the space race still feel more like the future than anything on the horizon.
Jack Shafer writes about the press for Slate.
By THOMAS MALLON, The New York Times, July 12, 2009
(ROCKET MEN: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, By Craig Nelson, Illustrated. 404 pp. Viking. $27.95)
and
(VOICES FROM THE MOON: Apollo Astronauts Describe Their Lunar Experiences, By Andrew Chaikin with Victoria Kohl, Illustrated. 201 pp. Viking Studio. $29.95)
The story of the moon landings is an oft-told tale, but one that feels stranger with each new telling. Walter Cronkite’s prediction, that after Apollo 11 “everything else that has happened in our time is going to be an asterisk,” wound up playing out backward. In our pop-historical memory of the 1960s, Project Apollo is the footnote, an oddball offshoot from assassinations, Vietnam and Charles Manson. Since 1972, no human has traveled beyond low-Earth orbit, a situation that makes one imagine what things might be like if, after Lindbergh’s flight, the species had contentedly gone back to making do with boats and trains.
Craig Nelson’s “Rocket Men” lacks the shapeliness and authority of some earlier lunar histories, but it ends up making an engaging contribution. He sensibly sets the Apollo period against “the interminable shuttle/space station era” that followed, and before that tracks the space race against the missile race that proceeded alongside it. Soviet-American competition in space may have looked like a peaceful alternative to war — a “celestial olympics” in Nelson’s nice phrasing — but the civilian-controlled NASA retained its “military DNA.” Lyndon Johnson, who earmarked the most money for the agency, confidentially pronounced it a bargain because of the yield from spy photography made possible in part by Project Gemini: “We know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were building things we didn’t need to build.”
Johnson’s predecessor had reached the White House by denouncing a missile gap that didn’t really exist. Once he was there, John F. Kennedy embraced the goal of a moon landing after the one-two punch of Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight and the Bay of Pigs debacle, but not from any personal enthusiasm for exploration. (“I’m not that interested in space,” he told NASA officials in 1962.) Addressing the United Nations after the successful completion of Project Mercury and only two months before his death, the president expressed his willingness to see the United States go to the moon with the Soviets instead of alone. Whether, during a second term, he might have ended the space race is a matter debated among historians of NASA just as the president’s ultimate intentions about Vietnam excite those in other fields.
In the event, the speed with which the Apollo program was realized is unimaginable to anyone young enough only to have seen the manned space program shuttle only through its later elephantine circles. Kennedy’s “before this decade is out” deadline for a lunar landing wasn’t pushed back, even after the Apollo 1 ground fire of 1967, which killed three astronauts and created an 18-month gap between manned missions. During that period, Nelson writes, “the entire agency would be re-engineered.” The tightly wound Frank Borman, commander of Apollo 8, recalls the atmosphere after the fire: “People got to drinking too much, taking uppers and downers, and the damn doctors were handing out stuff so that people could go to sleep and so they could wake up.” No space history — not Nelson’s, not even Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox’s 1989 volume, “Apollo,” which was oriented toward operations on the ground — has yet done this time and milieu full justice.
Nelson does make good use of NASA oral histories to amplify and adjust what one remembers of the early Apollo missions. However heavenly the voyage of Apollo 8 may have seemed — on Christmas Eve 1968, the astronauts read aloud from Genesis during their ninth orbit of the moon — Bill Anders, who flew the mission with Borman and Jim Lovell, reminds us that the cramped and vomit-stained command module felt like “an outhouse” by the time it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. The success of quiet, opaque Neil Armstrong has come to seem inevitable, but he was hardly a good-luck charm: before Apollo 11, he was nearly killed flying Gemini 8 and testing the lunar lander, and he had seen his own house in Houston burn to the ground.
On July 20, 1969, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin overshot their planned landing point and nearly ran out of fuel as they dodged boulders and false alarms from their computerized dashboard, looking for a place to come down. They made it with 17 seconds to spare. That night the Soviets’ unmanned Luna 15 spacecraft, which they hoped would scoop up rock samples and beat Apollo 11 home, crash-landed into another part of the moon, while the two Americans, having completed their walk around Tranquility Base, slept in the lunar module.
Nelson’s account of Apollo 11 fills about a quarter of the odd, modular structure he chooses for his book. He never goes for long without executing some nice writerly flourish — astronauts carrying their briefcase-shaped ventilators to the launch pad resemble “businessmen on their way to the future” — but a reader’s ears are sometimes irritated by the sound of boilerplate clanging into place (“greatest tragedies . . . astonishing triumphs”). Among Nelson’s achievements is the restoration of a certain grandeur to the moon itself, whose near-planetary status is arguable from the fact that “of 150 moons in the solar system, ours is the largest in relation to its host.”
Despite their “general lack of verbal firepower,” the moon’s astronaut explorers did their best to convey the look of the dusty world they suddenly saw in such sharp relief. (“Be descriptive!” Jan Armstrong called out to her husband’s televised form.) Some of their strongest efforts at recalling the lunar landscape can be found in “Voices From the Moon,” a new book of mission photographs and astronaut quotations compiled by Andrew Chaikin (author of “A Man on the Moon”) and Victoria Kohl.
A few of the recollections may stop you cold. Apollo 12’s Alan Bean, who later became a painter, recalls looking with wonder at Earth before having to upbraid himself: “I would say, I’ve got to quit doing this . . . because when I’m doing this, I’m not looking for rocks.” If any real scandal attaches to Project Apollo, it’s the extent to which hard science was allowed to dominate the astronauts’ hours on the moon. With less geology and more ontology, they might have kept the public fired up for further space exploration. Even Frank Borman, who became a no-nonsense C.E.O. back on Earth, realizes what the missions should really have been about: “We took the human intellect and the human vision, the human mind, 240,000 miles away from its home base. . . . Whether we found a rock there or not was of no importance.”
Nelson properly shakes his head over the long epilogue: “A mere 25 years from guided missile to man on the moon, and then . . . nothing.” Spectacular unmanned probes on the order of Galileo and Cassini, yes; but where manned spaceflight is concerned, NASA currently continues on the same irresolute and unimaginative road it has traveled since Richard Nixon’s last years in the White House. The Eagle, Armstrong and Aldrin’s delicate landing craft, returned the two astronauts to Apollo 11’s command module on July 21, 1969. The springy little machine, having done its job, was then cut loose. It fell back into lunar orbit and eventually to the moon’s surface. To this day, no one knows exactly where it is.
Thomas Mallon’s books include the novel “Aurora 7” and “Rockets and Rodeos,” a collection of essays.
Children’s Books: From Laika to the Lunar Module
By JACK SHAFER, The New York Times, July 12, 2009
(T-MINUS: The Race to the Moon, By Jim Ottaviani, Illustrated by Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon, 124 pp. Aladdin. $21.99. (Ages 8 to 12))
and
(ONE SMALL STEP: Celebrating the First Men on the Moon, By Jerry Stone, Illustrated. Unpaged. Flash Point/Roaring Brook Press. $24.95. (Ages 6 to 10))
and
(MISSION TO THE MOON: By Alan Dyer, Illustrated. 80 pp. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. $19.99. (Ages 8 to 12))
The early space race was really a chase, with the United States trailing its superpower rival — the So-viet Union — badly. The Soviets took a strong lead by tossing Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit in 1957 and smacking the moon in the face with the Luna 2 probe in 1959. Although the United States launched its first Earth satellite in 1958, its less powerful rockets had a tendency to detonate on the launch pad like short-fused bombs or break up after takeoff and sizzle like Fourth of July fireworks, or veer off course.
“T-Minus: The Race to the Moon,” a graphic novel written by Jim Ottaviani, tells the story of America’s come-from-behind victory in the space race’s main event — a manned moon landing. Ottaviani takes minimal liberties with the actual events to compress the great race into 124 pages: he deftly reimagines and expands the roles played by a few real-life aerospace engineers and contractors and imagines plausible dialogue for places where the historical record is incomplete.
The illustrations by Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon (no relation) capture both the inky vastness of space and the glory of the big flying machines, but the book’s primary subject is human emotions, not rockets or the heavens. Again and again, “T-Minus” — rocketeer lingo for time until takeoff — relies on close-ups to dramatize the life work of rocket visionaries from both nations’ space programs, like Robert Goddard, Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev. It’s about time the people who designed and built the spacecraft got top billing over the flyboys.
The Soviet Union’s first firsts were followed by still more: first to put a live animal into orbit (Laika the space dog in 1958); first to put a man into orbit (1961); first to put a woman into orbit (1963); first to conduct a space walk (1965). By the mid-1960s the Soviets owned all of the space endurance flight records, too.
The gap between the two programs seemed to widen in 1967 after Gus Grissom and his two crew mates died in a fire during a launch-pad practice session of their Apollo 1 capsule. NASA, which ran the space program, suspended Apollo flights while it made the craft safer, and President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing on the moon by the end of the 1960s appeared unreachable. But then the Soviets stumbled. Korolev, a top rocket designer, died unexpectedly during surgery in 1966, and the Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was killed during the emergency landing of the Soyuz 1. These events helped to sidetrack the Soviet program and create an opening for the Americans.
A series of successful Apollo missions in the late 1960s restored confidence at NASA and provided the steppingstones for an American moon landing. Just before Christmas 1968, in a preview of what was to come, the re-engineered Apollo 8 left Earth’s gravity and orbited the moon. “T-Minus” treats this flight to as many pages as the moon landing mission itself. In March 1969, Apollo 9 practiced docking with the lunar landing vehicle in Earth orbit; two months later Apollo 10 did the same in moon orbit; and on July 20, 1969 — 40 years ago — Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon at Tranquillity Base while Michael Collins orbited above in the mother ship that would ferry them back home.
“T-Minus” captures the optimism and courage of both countries’ space pioneers, making it an ideal entry point for new readers intrigued by the topic. Space know-it-alls will learn something, too. Who knew that the Apollo’s Saturn V launcher was delivered from Huntsville, Ala., to its Florida launch pad by barge?
This is a well-researched book. In its constellation of useful facts, dates and figures, I found just one error: it wrongly states that John Glenn’s Friendship 7 orbited the Earth in 1961. As the authors know, Glenn’s flight came in 1962.
The slickly produced “One Small Step: Celebrating the First Men on the Moon” purports to be a space-race scrapbook assembled by a young boy named Mike, who is pictured on its opening page and whose mother is a NASA scientist. Any reader inquisitive enough to enjoy “One Small Step” will quickly figure out that the annotated photos, insignias, lists, engineering diagrams and artwork taped and paper-clipped into place were assembled by the professionals listed on the book’s copyright page, none of them named Mike.
Awkward as this approach is, don’t let it keep you from appreciating “One Small Step.” The book’s scrapbook format invites readers to explore the concepts, technologies and personal stories behind manned space flight. Flaps open to chart the space race’s timeline or to explain the functioning of a piece of space hardware. A postcard with Laika the space dog begs to be peeled off the page and mailed. There’s even a detachable “First Man on the Moon” mini-pennant.
“Mission to the Moon,” by Alan Dyer, celebrating the Apollo 11 anniversary, covers much of the same area but does so with a straight documentary approach supplemented by a bonus DVD of Apollo footage (which works on a computer disk drive but not on a TV). If “One Small Step” is big fun, “Mission to the Moon” is serious fun, trusting the material instead of flaps and human drama to sustain reader interest. It should go without saying which book I’d pick to spend an evening with and which book I’d choose to add to my library.
These three books remind us of the time when the moon was a place people actually visited, a time of science fact that eclipses every volume of science fiction ever written. As any 12-year-old can tell you, the long-ago years of the space race still feel more like the future than anything on the horizon.
Jack Shafer writes about the press for Slate.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 07:16 pm (UTC)My impressions of him may be helped by Dave Foley's portrayal of him in an episode of From the Earth to the Moon