Densely packed with political and technical detail, but nonetheless engrossing: the defining work on a still-controversial...
Judicious biography of the Nazis’ chief rocket designer, who went on to lead the U.S. space program.
Son of a wealthy Prussian aristocrat, Werner Von Braun (1912–77) became fascinated with space travel during adolescence. His experiments with rockets while still an engineering student intrigued the German army, which hired him in 1932. Hitler’s 1933 accession opened the money floodgates, and Von Braun soon directed hundreds of workers in a top-secret complex. One result was the V-2, a dazzling achievement that killed thousands when launched against the Allies, in addition to the thousands of slave laborers who died while manufacturing the rocket under brutal conditions. Historian Neufeld (The Bombing of Auschwitz, 2000, etc.) agrees with critics who accuse Von Braun of complicity in Nazi crimes, noting that his obsession with space trumped any moral feelings. Brought to America with most of his team in 1945, the scientist energetically advocated space travel to a huge audience reached through books and a famous Colliers magazine series brought to television by Walt Disney. After the trauma of Sputnik’s launch in October 1957 and the embarrassing launch-pad explosion of the Vanguard TV-3 in December, Von Braun became a national hero and a media icon on January 31, 1958, when the first American satellite was successfully put into orbit. President Kennedy’s 1961 announcement of the Apollo program was the culmination of the scientist’s dreams. Despite receiving the lion’s share of publicity, his role was limited to designing the huge Saturn rocket, but this was the primary technological hurdle, and Saturn remains the only large booster that never failed. Neufeld stresses that Von Braun was less a brilliant innovator than a skilled leader of other brilliant men, much like the Manhattan Project’s J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Densely packed with political and technical detail, but nonetheless engrossing: the defining work on a still-controversial figure.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-26292-9
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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