A treasure trove of space travel ephemera that illustrates the glorious feedback loop between story and science.
Flights of fancy.
This lavishly illustrated book opens with a retraction. In 1920, the New York Times ran an editorial mocking rocket scientist Robert Goddard, who, in a footnote to “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” suggested that, for rockets, the sky was no longer the limit. The Times scoffed: Rockets can’t function in space because there’s “nothing to push against.” A half century later, with Apollo 11 en route to the Moon, the paper confessed its error. A correction to an editorial commenting on a footnote—that is the stuff of this wondrous book: the marginalia of space exploration, scraps, and oddities that reveal, in their hand-drawn doodles and torn edges, the larger story of humanity’s yearning for the stars. Campbell, a journalist, presents them with a collector’s passion: Galileo’s scrawled to-do list (pay debt to “Lord Manucci,” buy chickpeas), Newton’s plans for magic tricks (turn water into wine). “While space exploration relies on science and engineering,” Campbell writes, “the fuse is often lit by the artists and dreamers.” And sometimes, they’re one and the same, as we see in Somnium (Latin for dream or delusion), a 1634 sci-fi novel by the astronomer Johannes Kepler. You’d think this might be the earliest work of science fiction, but Campbell has a deeper cut: True History by Lucian of Samosata, written in the second century, about a sailing ship that ends up in a war on the moon. Campbell’s curation is illuminating. An Émile Bayard illustration of a splashdown from an 1874 edition of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon is displayed next to an uncannily similar 1969 photograph of Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin bobbing in the Pacific beside the Apollo 11 Command Module. With text as engaging as the images, the book can be read cover to cover or dipped into as a cabinet of curiosities. Its charm falters slightly when Campbell writes about the present day, as if the whimsy of the past has given way to sober reality. In fact, as the book brilliantly demonstrates, space exploration is one whirling mix of fact and fantasy. That’s exactly why there are footprints on the Moon.
A treasure trove of space travel ephemera that illustrates the glorious feedback loop between story and science.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9780500028186
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts.
But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill.
But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979
ISBN: 0312427565
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
BOOK TO SCREEN
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