Neufeld’s is the definitive biography, but Biddle offers a solid, moderately damning investigation of von Braun’s relation...
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Biddle (A Field Guide to the Invisible, 1998, etc.) recounts the early years of the quintessential “rocket scientist” and hero of America’s 1960s race to the moon.
Von Braun (1912–1977) led the team that designed the Saturn V, still the world’s most powerful rocket, and the only one that never failed. Even before America’s moon landing, he was a prominent media figure, narrating a Disney TV special on space flight and writing and speaking incessantly on interplanetary travel. Before World War II, von Braun directed Germany’s rocket program, which developed the V2, a military weapon capable of killing thousands. Anxious to exploit German technology, the United States discouraged investigations into von Braun’s activities under Hitler, and the scientist denied Nazi sympathies, maintaining that space travel was his obsession. Biddle disagrees. With a jaundiced eye, the author examines von Braun’s spectacular rise from a 20-year-old engineering student to, within five years, chief of a massive secret rocket-development project. Biddle makes a convincing case that von Braun had no objection to Hitler and regularly visited the squalid Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp where thousands died working to assemble the V2. Like Michael Neufeld’s Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (2007), Biddle asserts that the rocket scientist made a Faustian bargain with evil to further his ambitions. Unlike Neufeld, and less convincingly, he suggests that von Braun was a self-promoting charlatan, neither as preoccupied with space as he claimed nor as skilled an engineer.
Neufeld’s is the definitive biography, but Biddle offers a solid, moderately damning investigation of von Braun’s relation to the Third Reich.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-05910-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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