wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (08/20/85)
Short review of ...THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH, A Political History of the Space Age, by Walter A McDougall (1985, Basic Books, Inc., 461 pp plus appendix and notes). (The preceeding "..." is part of the title.) This book is a rather detailed history of the American & Soviet space efforts from WWII to the early 60's, with a brief survey of pre-WWII experiments. I found the sections on the Soviet program to be the most interesting; the parts on the earlier American efforts (just after WWII and under Eisenhower) were also rather intriguing. Unfortunately, the wealth of detail and documents available for the later American portion (under LBJ and Kennedy) leads to such elaborate and in-depth discussion that it became overly concerned with minutiae and rather boring. I realize that such info is necessary for a "definitive" work on a subject, but I was reading this in bed in the evenings over the past days, and found myself consistently falling asleep and eventually just skimmed the later part. Nonetheless, I do recommend the first portion and having worthwhile information and interesting discussion. Regards, Will Martin UUCP/USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin or ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA