2020, ISBN: 9780670021031

Simon & Schuster. Very Good. 7 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches. Hardcover. 2003. 528 pages.<br>A history of the computer company Oracle chronicles its rise to become one of the industry… More...

Simon & Schuster. Very Good. 7 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches. Hardcover. 2003. 528 pages.<br>A history of the computer company Oracle chronicles its rise to become one of the industry's most powerful and profi table companies, noting its penchant for reinventing itself in pu rsuit of new goals. Editorial Reviews Review Softwar is a biography of Larry Ellison and his company, Oracle. As such , it's simultaneously a portrait of a clever and driven man, a ca se study of a successful software development company, and a tabl eau of the commercial software industry from its beginnings, thro ugh the dot-com craze, and into the present era. Matthew Symonds, who began this project while working as the editor of the excell ent technology section of the Economist, has done a great job wit h all three elements of his project, thanks in no small part to t he tremendous access he was given and to his close collaboration with Ellison. Collaboration is very nearly the right word, as El lison reviewed Symonds' manuscript before publication and, while he did not alter it, he did make a large number of comments, whic h appear in the book as footnotes. As Symonds is a good journalis t who attributes most of his material, Ellison is able to take is sue immediately with statements other people make about him and h is company. The overall effect is hypertextual, and represents an important new biographical technique that other writers should i mitate. Softwar succeeds because Ellison has a fantastically inte resting life, tremendous experience, and carefully considered opi nions, and because Symonds communicates them with clarity and sty le. --David Wall Topics covered: The life, times, acquaintances, tastes, toys, and opinions of Larry Ellison, the database entrep reneur and CEO of Oracle Corporation. From Publishers Weekly Sy monds was technology editor at the Economist when Ellison invited him to collaborate on a book about e-business, but the journalis t decided he would rather write a profile of the software tycoon, one of Silicon Valley's most notorious figures. Oracle's databas e programs have become integral to the Internet and other network ed computer systems, and Oracle's head is convinced that he can s urpass Microsoft as the industry leader. But he's also developed a reputation for his aggressive corporate tactics and personal fl amboyance. Ellison agreed to cooperate with the project, but as p art of the deal, he reserved the right to respond, which he does in a series of running footnotes. Sometimes he only uses the oppo rtunity to mouth business platitudes, but he also refutes stories , cracks jokes and even argues with other sources. Although the b ook deals extensively with Oracle's efforts to promote a new soft ware package, it comes to life most when it follows Ellison outsi de the office-prepping his sailboat for a run at the America's Cu p or overseeing the final touches on a Japanese garden complex. S ymonds's near-total access to his subject leads to intimate obser vations that verge on personal advice, as when the writer suggest s how best to handle a top Oracle executive or comments on the re lationship between Ellison and his two children. But he remains o bjective enough to point out several mistakes in the past managem ent of Oracle (many of which Ellison acknowledges or clarifies). Even without its unusual counterpoint, the book would stand as a compelling portrayal of one of the computer industry's most influ ential leaders. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Publishers Weekly Symonds was technology editor at the Econo mist when Ellison invited him to collaborate on a book about e-bu siness, but the journalist decided he would rather write a profil e of the software tycoon, one of Silicon Valley's most notorious figures. Oracle's database programs have become integral to the I nternet and other networked computer systems, and Oracle's head i s convinced that he can surpass Microsoft as the industry leader. But he's also developed a reputation for his aggressive corporat e tactics and personal flamboyance. Ellison agreed to cooperate w ith the project, but as part of the deal, he reserved the right t o respond, which he does in a series of running footnotes. Someti mes he only uses the opportunity to mouth business platitudes, bu t he also refutes stories, cracks jokes and even argues with othe r sources. Although the book deals extensively with Oracle's effo rts to promote a new software package, it comes to life most when it follows Ellison outside the office-prepping his sailboat for a run at the America's Cup or overseeing the final touches on a J apanese garden complex. Symonds's near-total access to his subjec t leads to intimate observations that verge on personal advice, a s when the writer suggests how best to handle a top Oracle execut ive or comments on the relationship between Ellison and his two c hildren. But he remains objective enough to point out several mis takes in the past management of Oracle (many of which Ellison ack nowledges or clarifies). Even without its unusual counterpoint, t he book would stand as a compelling portrayal of one of the compu ter industry's most influential leaders. Copyright 2003 Reed Bus iness Information, Inc. From Booklist There has been a war brewi ng in the software industry that most computer users don't even k now about. Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, wants to supplant th e current Windows-based client-server network architecture with a totally Internet-based solution that would simplify computing an d make Microsoft's server software obsolete. Even now, Oracle is the dominant software in business; every time you do a Google sea rch or buy something on , you are using it. Anyone who craves a play-by-play account of Ellison and the evolution of the number-one relational database in the world can really sink thei r teeth into this. There is a slightly bizarre twist to this high -tech tale: Ellison himself gets to throw in running commentary a t the bottom of many pages, augmenting and often contradicting th e author's text in his own brash style. Beware if you 're not up on your geekspeak, though, as the casual reader will get lost in all the IT systems acronyms thrown around, such as CRM, ERP, HR a nd TPC-C. More entertaining than the technical jargon is the ruth less backstabbing that goes on between Ellison and big-name compe titors such as Microsoft, Seibel Systems, PeopleSoft and i2 Techn ologies. David Siegfried Copyright © American Library Association . All rights reserved Review Alan Goldstein The Dallas Morning N ews Thank goodness for Larry Ellison. The chairman and chief exec utive of Oracle Corporation always keeps things interesting. -- R eview About the Author Matthew Symonds is currently political ed itor of The Economist, but before that was the magazine's technol ogy and communications editor for nearly four years. He has also been a founding editorial director of The Independent and strateg y director of BBC Worldwide Television. Symonds lives in London w ith his wife and three children. Excerpt. ® Reprinted by permiss ion. All rights reserved. Chapter One: Larry and Me I first met Larry Ellison in his office at Oracle's Redwood Shores headquart ers on December 8, 1997. I had recently become The Economist's te chnology and communications editor, and this was the first of wha t became regular visits to Silicon Valley. I had just completed t wo days of meetings at Microsoft's campus at Redmond, Washington, 800 miles to the north, where an array of impressively on-messag e executives had been wheeled out for my benefit -- though unfort unately not Bill Gates himself. I would see him on my next visit, I was assured. But there was a strong hint that face time with B ill was conditional on The Economist's taking a more sympathetic line toward Microsoft in the antitrust case that the Department o f Justice was preparing against it. After a similar turn involvin g Oracle's most senior managers, I had been promised time with El lison himself. It turned out I'd picked a bad afternoon. I didn 't know it at the time, but Oracle was about to issue its first e arnings warning since the firm had nearly gone under in 1990. The economic crisis in Asia had taken its toll, and in North America , slowing license sales of Oracle's most important product, its a ll-conquering database, seemed to support the argument of some an alysts that Oracle was dominating a market that was getting close to saturation. The following day, the stock lost 30 percent of i ts value. As I waited, I could see Ellison through the glass do ors of the eleventh-floor boardroom, huddled in conversation. He was already an hour and a half late for his interview with me and I knew he had to fly to New York later in the day to deliver a k eynote speech at an Internet conference. I had heard stories abou t Ellison's lateness and didn't believe the press flak's distract ed excuses about an emergency being the cause of the delay. Let's leave it for another time, I suggested grumpily. But at that mom ent, I was suddenly ushered into Ellison's handsome office with i ts expensive Japanese artifacts and panoramic views across the ba y. Despite the strain he must have been under, Ellison was cour tesy itself. After apologizing profusely for his lateness, he beg an to talk about technology. His theme was the failure of the pre vailing computer architecture of the day, known as client/server (because the job of running software was shared between server co mputers in corporate data centers and their desktop PC clients). He believed client/server was an evolutionary dead end that was d istributing complexity with disastrous consequences. The answer w as a new model of computing based on the Internet, in which the c omplexity and the computing would be hidden in the network. Users would be able to access everything they needed through a web bro wser that could be run by a machine much less expensive and canta nkerous than a PC -- a network computer. There was nothing unex pected in this. It was a drum that Ellison had been beating for s ome time, and conceptually it was little different from Sun Micro systems's famous slogan that the network is the computer. Ellison had first declared the PC a ridiculous device at a technology co nference in Paris more than two years earlier. The speech, at the height of the hoopla surrounding the release of Windows 95 and i n front of an audience that included Bill Gates, caused a minor s ensation. Ellison ran through a well-rehearsed routine, but the re was nonetheless something extraordinarily compelling about his argument. He seemed to be speaking directly to the problems that anyone who depended on computers at work knew all too well: the crash-prone PC with its incomprehensible error messages; the incr edible effort of maintaining thousands of PCs across a company; t he apparently insurmountable difficulties of getting reasonable p erformance and scalability across wide-area networks. The argumen ts seemed utterly rational and commonsensical, while Ellison hims elf was passionate and funny. ??? Over the next three years, Ellison was proved to be far more right than wrong. The network c omputer itself proved to be a dazzling digression: Ellison had be en right about how the Internet would change the way computers we re used, but most people still reckoned that the best way of gett ing to the Internet was through a PC. A few network computers wer e made by Oracle and a loosely knit coalition of Microsoft's enem ies, such as IBM and Sun Microsystems, but tumbling PC prices and the limitations imposed by slow dial-up connections quickly cond emned them to irrelevance. Microsoft crowed; Ellison was made to look a bit foolish. But the PC versus the NC was a sideshow that stole attention from the real struggle for the future of computin g. What mattered was that Ellison had understood better than anyo ne the potential impact of the Internet on enterprise computing i n general and on Oracle in particular.* While the technology an alysts in the investment banks and the consultancies confidently predicted the maturing of the database market, Ellison realized t hat the Internet would exponentially increase both the number of database transactions and the number of people who would interact with Oracle's databases. That would mean more license growth tha n the analysts had dreamed of. Every time someone looked for a bo ok on , bought stock through E*TRADE, or put something up for auction on , that person was using an Oracle database. Ellison believed that the database would be the essential platfo rm for Internet computing, effectively displacing the once all-im portant operating system. Within companies, the same thing woul d happen. Instead of business software being used by only a handf ul of specialists, Internet-based applications could be extended to anyone with authorization and a browser. Every time one of tho se applications was used, there was a good chance that it would q uery the database that the application ran on. When the networkin g giant Cisco Systems talked of having a URL for everything we do , it was another way of saying that everybody they employed was c onstantly using the firm's Oracle database. In a client/server wo rld, less sophisticated databases, such as Microsoft's SQL Server , might have become good enough for many businesses, but with Int ernet computing came the need for databases that could support mi llions of users at once. With the coming of e-business, Oracle's databases became at least as much an essential element of infrast ructure as Cisco's routers or the big server computers made by th e likes of Sun that were also back in fashion. It was no coincide nce that in early 2000 those three companies -- the three superst ars of the Internet -- had a combined market value of nearly a tr illion dollars. If that was a stroke of luck for Oracle, what w asn't was Ellison's decision, to the horror of many colleagues an d customers, to abandon all further development of client/server- based applications and concentrate the firm's entire engineering effort on building for the new computing architecture of the Inte rnet. While rivals in the apps business, such as the German power house SAP and PeopleSoft, talked up the Internet and put a web fr ont-end on some of their products, Ellison went much further. Ora cle was the first established software firm to risk everything on the new paradigm. His rationale was simple: Oracle could never hope to be number one in enterprise applications as long as clie nt/, Simon & Schuster, 2003, 3, Viking Adult. Very Good. 6.42 x 1.41 x 9.58 inches. Hardcover. 2009. 416 pages. <br>A richly detailed and dramatic account of one of t he greatest achievements of humankind At 9:32 A.M. on July 16, 1 969, the Apollo 11 rocket launched in the presence of more than a million spectators who had gathered to witness a truly historic event. It carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins t o the last frontier of human imagination: the moon. Rocket Men i s the thrilling story of the moon mission, and it restores the my stery and majesty to an event that may have become too familiar f or most people to realize what a stunning achievement it represen ted in planning, technology, and execution. Through interviews, twenty-three thousand pages of NASA oral histories, and declassif ied CIA documents on the space race, Craig Nelson re-creates a vi vid and detailed account of the Apollo 11 mission. From the quoti dian to the scientific to the magical, readers are taken right in to the cockpit with Aldrin and Armstrong and behind the scenes at Mission Control. Rocket Men is the story of a twentieth-century pilgrimage; a voyage into the unknown motivated by politics, fai th, science, and wonder that changed the course of history. Edit orial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. In this extensi vely researched account of that epic achievement, former publishi ng executive and prize-winning author Nelson (The First Heroes) m oves seamlessly between Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin an d Collins, their nervous families and the equally nervous NASA gr ound crew. Nelson follows Armstrong in nail-biting detail as he t ries to find a place to land with less than a minuteÖs worth of f uel remaining. A large central section of the book digresses to p rovide some backstory on the feverish American-Soviet game of one -upmanship in the year leading up to the Apollo 11 launch. For in stance, Nelson describes Apollo 8 as an almost reckless gamble by NASA to beat the Russians in sending men to orbit the moon The b ook also describes the sad personal toll the mission took. Collin s was best able to deal with the cost of fame yet expressed the a nticlimax of life after Apollo 11: I seem gripped by earthly ennu i. Space fans and readers who remember that momentous time will f ind this an exciting read. (June 29) Copyright ® Reed Business I nformation, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* Using interviews, NASA oral hist ories, and declassified CIA material, Nelson has produced a magni ficent, very readable account of the steps that led to the succes s of Apollo 11. In the 40 years since the first moon landing and the 52 years since Sputnik was launched, it isn't always remember ed now what an experiment the Apollo program was, nor that the sp ace race was as much a military as a scientific campaign. The spa ce program was launched using the knowledge of rockets available at the end of World War II and former Third Reich scientists work ing in both American and Soviet programs. When it came to sending men into orbit and beyond, routines and equipment had to be inve nted and tested in minute increments. Nelson's descriptions take us back, showing the assorted teams and how they worked together. We meet the astronauts and find out why they were eager to take on this mission, and we also meet the hypercareful technicians, w ithout whom neither men nor craft would have left the ground. Nel son shows, too, how the technology and the politics of the times interrelated. Leslie Fish, songwriter, summed it up perfectly, To all the unknown heroes, sing out to every shore / What makes one step a giant leap is all the steps before. Nelson brightly illum inates those steps. --Frieda Murray About the Author Craig Nelso n has been a vice president and executive editor of Harper & Row, Hyperion, Random House, and Villard, and a literary agent. He is the author of several books, including Thomas Paine, winner of t he 2007 Henry Adams Prize. He has been profiled in Variety, Inter view, Publishers Weekly, and Time Out. From The Washington Post From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com To under stand how completely Apollo 11 dominates the history of the space program, consider for a moment the previous mission, Apollo 10. The astronauts on that one were . . . um . . . hold on . . . Goog ling as we speak . . . John Young, Eugene Cernan and Thomas Staff ord. All they did was get in a capsule atop a 30-story rocket, bl ast off the planet and fly all the freakin' way to the moon. Two of them then got into a contraption called a lunar module and des cended toward the moon's surface. Down, down they went. But they didn't land, because this was just a practice run for lunar orbit rendezvous. The glory of the first lunar landing would be reserv ed for the next mission. Indeed, to ensure that no eager-beaver a stronaut would say to heck with it and try to land, NASA didn't g ive the ascent module enough fuel to leave the moon's surface. Th e astronauts would have been stranded if they'd ignored orders. A nd so they dutifully flew home, their mission soon lost in the gl are of Apollo 11. Forty years on, the space program is still stru ggling to figure out how to top the fabled moonshot of July 1969. Apollo 11 may have been the greatest achievement in spaceflight, but arguably, it nearly killed the space program. Because what d o you do after you shoot the moon? You build a space shuttle. You build a space station. You launch telescopes. You dither around in low-Earth orbit for decades. But no matter what you do, you fi nd that Apollo 11 is an impossible act to follow. This summer, un der orders from President Obama, NASA's human spaceflight program is getting a soup-to-nuts review by a 10-person panel headed by former aerospace executive Norman Augustine. The committee will s pend a lot of time pondering rocket design (which do you prefer, the Ares 1 or an EELV?). But while racing toward an end-of-summer deadline, the committee will grapple with a more basic question: What are we doing in space? NASA currently plans to finish build ing the international space station and retire the shuttle, proba bly somewhere around the end of 2010. We're supposed to have a ne w fleet of spacecraft ready by about 2015. NASA hopes to put astr onauts on the moon again by 2020. This is not an Apollo-style rus h job but an incremental expansion of our presence in space, with a future Mars mission lurking as a remote possibility. Taxpayers are likely to ask an obvious question about a moonshot: Didn't w e already do that? Apollo 11 was something of a stunt, a flags-an d-footprints mission in which science got short shrift. But what a stunt! Craig Nelson's new book, Rocket Men, captures the drama and chaos of July 1969 and the almost unbearable tension of the m oon landing. When reporters knocked on astronaut spouse Joan Aldr in's door and started pelting her with inane questions soon after the Eagle set down on the Sea of Tranquillity, she screamed at t hem: Listen! Aren't you all excited? They did it! They did it! Ye ah: They did it, and they did it with smarts, pluck and -- agains t all odds in a technogeek culture -- style. Spaceflight requires exquisite planning as well as improvisation. Apollo 11 represent ed that in the extreme. Years in the making, with a supporting ca st of tens of thousands, the mission ultimately depended on Neil Armstrong flying the lunar module over a boulder field with only seconds of fuel to spare. Nelson describes the landing so vividly that the engrossed reader isn't sure that Armstrong and crewmate Buzz Aldrin are going to make it. Nelson places Apollo 11 in a b roader narrative of American engineering genius. Our society, he argues, does not adequately appreciate the technological feats th at make our culture possible: the big pipes, the vast roads, the power grids, the dams, and the people-and-cargo-carrying vehicles of heroic engineering and big science. He writes: Before the 199 0s' Silicon Valley entrepreneurs with their Red Bulls, boxed pizz a, and Cheetos, there were the short-sleeved-white-shirted denize ns of Houston's NASA with pocket protectors, Mexican takeout, eva porating hot-plate coffee, and ashtrays choked in smoldering ciga rette butts, and before them were New York and New Mexico's Manha ttan Project brain trust of alpha engineers in their fedoras and soft, floppy jackets. Everyone knew that spaceflight was dangerou s, but even so, the public was never told of the internal fears a nd uncertainties at NASA. Consider, for example, Apollo 8. It may have been an even more daring mission than the lunar landing. It was only the third flight of the giant Saturn V rocket, and the first with human beings in a capsule on top. NASA decided not onl y to launch a crew into orbit on the Saturn V but to send them al l the way to the moon, a quarter-million miles away. It came clos e to a suicide mission. Someone overheard a NASA official wonderi ng, before the launch, Just how do we tell Susan Borman, 'Frank i s stranded in orbit around the moon?' In many cases the astronau ts struggled to communicate exactly what it was like, being out t here in space. They spoke in jargon and acronyms. They stuck to t he engineering tasks at hand. The can-do attitude is so embedded in the space-cowboy psyche that it's almost impossible for the as tronauts to admit that the whole thing is shot through with uncer tainty, doubt, fear, occasional despair, a little bit of grief an d a lot of night sweats. Michael Collins, the third Apollo 11 cre wman, said that if someone asked him during a spaceflight how he felt about something, he'd answer, What? Huh? I don't know how I feel about that, you want the temperature, you want the pressure, you want the velocity, you want the altitude, what do you mean, how do I feel about that? Armstrong was a particularly taciturn f igure. He nearly died in a training exercise shortly before the A pollo 11 mission -- he had to eject and parachute to safety as hi s module training craft exploded -- then calmly returned to his o ffice and said nothing about it. No, he didn't have ice water in his veins -- his pulse hit 156 as he struggled to find a safe pla ce to land the lunar module -- but he was extraordinarily reserve d and remains to this day something of an enigma. Which makes Ald rin the most compelling Apollo figure: His new memoir, Magnificen t Desolation, describes how he was debilitated by depression and alcoholism soon after he returned from the moon. Aldrin plays dow n the significance of being second rather than first, but Nelson notes that when he got home he had to look at a commemorative sta mp showing the First Man on the Moon -- one guy! As though steppi ng onto the moon 20 minutes after Armstrong made him a rounding e rror. Another tidbit from Nelson: There are no good photographs o f Armstrong on the moon. Aldrin, um, kind of forgot to take any. So the most iconic shots of a spaceman on the moon were taken by Armstrong and show Aldrin. Nelson has a dim view of NASA's achiev ements since Apollo, particularly compared with that initial burs t of technological brilliance in which rockets went from weapons to spaceships: A mere twenty-five years from guided missile to ma n on the Moon, and then . . . nothing. Which is too harsh, by far . Raise your hand if you watched the astronauts fix the Hubble te lescope this spring. It was spaceflight at its finest. The shuttl e, derided as a mere space truck, never quite got its due (indeed , it can perform many feats that the next generation of spacecraf t couldn't possibly achieve). But even if he's a bit dyspeptic ab out current space programs, Nelson is surely correct in the main: We've never matched Apollo 11. There will be more marvelous achi evements in space, but it's not clear how many of them will be by flesh-and-blood creatures, or by Americans. The Augustine commit tee members, busy as they are figuring out our destiny in space, should bone up on Apollo 11. It was a bit like Babe Ruth pointing to a spot in the distant bleachers before belting a home run to that exact location. But it was also great engineering and dazzli ng human bravado. And it was the kind of thing that great nations do. achenbachj@washpost.com Copyright 2009, The Washington Post . All Rights Reserved. ., Viking Adult, 2009, 3<

2020, ISBN: 9780670021031

An extraordinary and dazzlingly original work from one of our most gifted and interesting writers" (Emily St. John Mandel, author of The Glass Hotel). The Need, which finds a mother of tw… More...

An extraordinary and dazzlingly original work from one of our most gifted and interesting writers" (Emily St. John Mandel, author of The Glass Hotel). The Need, which finds a mother of two young children grappling with the dualities of motherhood after confronting a masked intruder in her home, is "like nothing you've ever read beforein a good way" (People).When Molly, home alone with her two young children, hears footsteps in the living room, she tries to convince herself it's the sleep deprivation. She's been hearing things these days. Startling at loud noises. Imagining the worst-case scenario. It's what mothers do, she knows.But then the footsteps come again, and she catches a glimpse of movement.Suddenly Molly finds herself face-to-face with an intruder who knows far too much about her and her family. As she attempts to protect those she loves most, Molly must also acknowledge her own frailty. Molly slips down an existential rabbit hole where she must confront the dualities of motherhood: the ecstasy and the dread; the languor and the ferocity; the banality and the transcendence as the book hurtles toward a mind-bending conclusion.In The Need, Helen Phillips has created a subversive, speculative thriller that comes to life through blazing, arresting prose and gorgeous, haunting imagery. "Brilliant" (Entertainment Weekly), "grotesque and lovely" (The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice), and "wildly captivating" (O, The Oprah Magazine), The Need is a glorious celebration of the bizarre and beautiful nature of our everyday lives and "showcases an extraordinary writer at her electrifying best" (Publishers Weekly, starred review)., Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (July 7, 2020), 6, Shogakukan, 2020-09. New. 2 () / / 18 x 13.1 x 1.6 cm / 0.28 kg, Shogakukan, 2020-09, 6, Viking Adult. Very Good. 6.42 x 1.41 x 9.58 inches. Hardcover. 2009. 416 pages. <br>A richly detailed and dramatic account of one of t he greatest achievements of humankind At 9:32 A.M. on July 16, 1 969, the Apollo 11 rocket launched in the presence of more than a million spectators who had gathered to witness a truly historic event. It carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins t o the last frontier of human imagination: the moon. Rocket Men i s the thrilling story of the moon mission, and it restores the my stery and majesty to an event that may have become too familiar f or most people to realize what a stunning achievement it represen ted in planning, technology, and execution. Through interviews, twenty-three thousand pages of NASA oral histories, and declassif ied CIA documents on the space race, Craig Nelson re-creates a vi vid and detailed account of the Apollo 11 mission. From the quoti dian to the scientific to the magical, readers are taken right in to the cockpit with Aldrin and Armstrong and behind the scenes at Mission Control. Rocket Men is the story of a twentieth-century pilgrimage; a voyage into the unknown motivated by politics, fai th, science, and wonder that changed the course of history. Edit orial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. In this extensi vely researched account of that epic achievement, former publishi ng executive and prize-winning author Nelson (The First Heroes) m oves seamlessly between Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin an d Collins, their nervous families and the equally nervous NASA gr ound crew. Nelson follows Armstrong in nail-biting detail as he t ries to find a place to land with less than a minuteÖs worth of f uel remaining. A large central section of the book digresses to p rovide some backstory on the feverish American-Soviet game of one -upmanship in the year leading up to the Apollo 11 launch. For in stance, Nelson describes Apollo 8 as an almost reckless gamble by NASA to beat the Russians in sending men to orbit the moon The b ook also describes the sad personal toll the mission took. Collin s was best able to deal with the cost of fame yet expressed the a nticlimax of life after Apollo 11: I seem gripped by earthly ennu i. Space fans and readers who remember that momentous time will f ind this an exciting read. (June 29) Copyright ® Reed Business I nformation, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* Using interviews, NASA oral hist ories, and declassified CIA material, Nelson has produced a magni ficent, very readable account of the steps that led to the succes s of Apollo 11. In the 40 years since the first moon landing and the 52 years since Sputnik was launched, it isn't always remember ed now what an experiment the Apollo program was, nor that the sp ace race was as much a military as a scientific campaign. The spa ce program was launched using the knowledge of rockets available at the end of World War II and former Third Reich scientists work ing in both American and Soviet programs. When it came to sending men into orbit and beyond, routines and equipment had to be inve nted and tested in minute increments. Nelson's descriptions take us back, showing the assorted teams and how they worked together. We meet the astronauts and find out why they were eager to take on this mission, and we also meet the hypercareful technicians, w ithout whom neither men nor craft would have left the ground. Nel son shows, too, how the technology and the politics of the times interrelated. Leslie Fish, songwriter, summed it up perfectly, To all the unknown heroes, sing out to every shore / What makes one step a giant leap is all the steps before. Nelson brightly illum inates those steps. --Frieda Murray About the Author Craig Nelso n has been a vice president and executive editor of Harper & Row, Hyperion, Random House, and Villard, and a literary agent. He is the author of several books, including Thomas Paine, winner of t he 2007 Henry Adams Prize. He has been profiled in Variety, Inter view, Publishers Weekly, and Time Out. From The Washington Post From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com To under stand how completely Apollo 11 dominates the history of the space program, consider for a moment the previous mission, Apollo 10. The astronauts on that one were . . . um . . . hold on . . . Goog ling as we speak . . . John Young, Eugene Cernan and Thomas Staff ord. All they did was get in a capsule atop a 30-story rocket, bl ast off the planet and fly all the freakin' way to the moon. Two of them then got into a contraption called a lunar module and des cended toward the moon's surface. Down, down they went. But they didn't land, because this was just a practice run for lunar orbit rendezvous. The glory of the first lunar landing would be reserv ed for the next mission. Indeed, to ensure that no eager-beaver a stronaut would say to heck with it and try to land, NASA didn't g ive the ascent module enough fuel to leave the moon's surface. Th e astronauts would have been stranded if they'd ignored orders. A nd so they dutifully flew home, their mission soon lost in the gl are of Apollo 11. Forty years on, the space program is still stru ggling to figure out how to top the fabled moonshot of July 1969. Apollo 11 may have been the greatest achievement in spaceflight, but arguably, it nearly killed the space program. Because what d o you do after you shoot the moon? You build a space shuttle. You build a space station. You launch telescopes. You dither around in low-Earth orbit for decades. But no matter what you do, you fi nd that Apollo 11 is an impossible act to follow. This summer, un der orders from President Obama, NASA's human spaceflight program is getting a soup-to-nuts review by a 10-person panel headed by former aerospace executive Norman Augustine. The committee will s pend a lot of time pondering rocket design (which do you prefer, the Ares 1 or an EELV?). But while racing toward an end-of-summer deadline, the committee will grapple with a more basic question: What are we doing in space? NASA currently plans to finish build ing the international space station and retire the shuttle, proba bly somewhere around the end of 2010. We're supposed to have a ne w fleet of spacecraft ready by about 2015. NASA hopes to put astr onauts on the moon again by 2020. This is not an Apollo-style rus h job but an incremental expansion of our presence in space, with a future Mars mission lurking as a remote possibility. Taxpayers are likely to ask an obvious question about a moonshot: Didn't w e already do that? Apollo 11 was something of a stunt, a flags-an d-footprints mission in which science got short shrift. But what a stunt! Craig Nelson's new book, Rocket Men, captures the drama and chaos of July 1969 and the almost unbearable tension of the m oon landing. When reporters knocked on astronaut spouse Joan Aldr in's door and started pelting her with inane questions soon after the Eagle set down on the Sea of Tranquillity, she screamed at t hem: Listen! Aren't you all excited? They did it! They did it! Ye ah: They did it, and they did it with smarts, pluck and -- agains t all odds in a technogeek culture -- style. Spaceflight requires exquisite planning as well as improvisation. Apollo 11 represent ed that in the extreme. Years in the making, with a supporting ca st of tens of thousands, the mission ultimately depended on Neil Armstrong flying the lunar module over a boulder field with only seconds of fuel to spare. Nelson describes the landing so vividly that the engrossed reader isn't sure that Armstrong and crewmate Buzz Aldrin are going to make it. Nelson places Apollo 11 in a b roader narrative of American engineering genius. Our society, he argues, does not adequately appreciate the technological feats th at make our culture possible: the big pipes, the vast roads, the power grids, the dams, and the people-and-cargo-carrying vehicles of heroic engineering and big science. He writes: Before the 199 0s' Silicon Valley entrepreneurs with their Red Bulls, boxed pizz a, and Cheetos, there were the short-sleeved-white-shirted denize ns of Houston's NASA with pocket protectors, Mexican takeout, eva porating hot-plate coffee, and ashtrays choked in smoldering ciga rette butts, and before them were New York and New Mexico's Manha ttan Project brain trust of alpha engineers in their fedoras and soft, floppy jackets. Everyone knew that spaceflight was dangerou s, but even so, the public was never told of the internal fears a nd uncertainties at NASA. Consider, for example, Apollo 8. It may have been an even more daring mission than the lunar landing. It was only the third flight of the giant Saturn V rocket, and the first with human beings in a capsule on top. NASA decided not onl y to launch a crew into orbit on the Saturn V but to send them al l the way to the moon, a quarter-million miles away. It came clos e to a suicide mission. Someone overheard a NASA official wonderi ng, before the launch, Just how do we tell Susan Borman, 'Frank i s stranded in orbit around the moon?' In many cases the astronau ts struggled to communicate exactly what it was like, being out t here in space. They spoke in jargon and acronyms. They stuck to t he engineering tasks at hand. The can-do attitude is so embedded in the space-cowboy psyche that it's almost impossible for the as tronauts to admit that the whole thing is shot through with uncer tainty, doubt, fear, occasional despair, a little bit of grief an d a lot of night sweats. Michael Collins, the third Apollo 11 cre wman, said that if someone asked him during a spaceflight how he felt about something, he'd answer, What? Huh? I don't know how I feel about that, you want the temperature, you want the pressure, you want the velocity, you want the altitude, what do you mean, how do I feel about that? Armstrong was a particularly taciturn f igure. He nearly died in a training exercise shortly before the A pollo 11 mission -- he had to eject and parachute to safety as hi s module training craft exploded -- then calmly returned to his o ffice and said nothing about it. No, he didn't have ice water in his veins -- his pulse hit 156 as he struggled to find a safe pla ce to land the lunar module -- but he was extraordinarily reserve d and remains to this day something of an enigma. Which makes Ald rin the most compelling Apollo figure: His new memoir, Magnificen t Desolation, describes how he was debilitated by depression and alcoholism soon after he returned from the moon. Aldrin plays dow n the significance of being second rather than first, but Nelson notes that when he got home he had to look at a commemorative sta mp showing the First Man on the Moon -- one guy! As though steppi ng onto the moon 20 minutes after Armstrong made him a rounding e rror. Another tidbit from Nelson: There are no good photographs o f Armstrong on the moon. Aldrin, um, kind of forgot to take any. So the most iconic shots of a spaceman on the moon were taken by Armstrong and show Aldrin. Nelson has a dim view of NASA's achiev ements since Apollo, particularly compared with that initial burs t of technological brilliance in which rockets went from weapons to spaceships: A mere twenty-five years from guided missile to ma n on the Moon, and then . . . nothing. Which is too harsh, by far . Raise your hand if you watched the astronauts fix the Hubble te lescope this spring. It was spaceflight at its finest. The shuttl e, derided as a mere space truck, never quite got its due (indeed , it can perform many feats that the next generation of spacecraf t couldn't possibly achieve). But even if he's a bit dyspeptic ab out current space programs, Nelson is surely correct in the main: We've never matched Apollo 11. There will be more marvelous achi evements in space, but it's not clear how many of them will be by flesh-and-blood creatures, or by Americans. The Augustine commit tee members, busy as they are figuring out our destiny in space, should bone up on Apollo 11. It was a bit like Babe Ruth pointing to a spot in the distant bleachers before belting a home run to that exact location. But it was also great engineering and dazzli ng human bravado. And it was the kind of thing that great nations do. achenbachj@washpost.com Copyright 2009, The Washington Post . All Rights Reserved. ., Viking Adult, 2009, 3<

2020, ISBN: 9780670021031

Hardcover

Pan Books. Very Good. 7.91 x 0.71 x 7.83 inches. Paperback. 1660. 320 pages. <br>During the 2,597 orbits he made on the Internation al Space Station, astronaut Chis Hadfield took 45… More...

Pan Books. Very Good. 7.91 x 0.71 x 7.83 inches. Paperback. 1660. 320 pages. <br>During the 2,597 orbits he made on the Internation al Space Station, astronaut Chis Hadfield took 45,000 photographs of the Earth. In this edited collection of images, Hadfield crea tes a single, virtual orbit of our planet, capturing close-up det ail of six continents. From the scorched-red ripples of the Austr alian outback to the pixelated farmland of Californias San Joaqui n Valley, his work reveals visual patterns and abstractions creat ed by climate, geological processes, farming, urbanization and, d isturbingly, deforestation. ., Pan Books, 1660, 3, Viking Adult. Very Good. 6.42 x 1.41 x 9.58 inches. Hardcover. 2009. 416 pages. <br>A richly detailed and dramatic account of one of t he greatest achievements of humankind At 9:32 A.M. on July 16, 1 969, the Apollo 11 rocket launched in the presence of more than a million spectators who had gathered to witness a truly historic event. It carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins t o the last frontier of human imagination: the moon. Rocket Men i s the thrilling story of the moon mission, and it restores the my stery and majesty to an event that may have become too familiar f or most people to realize what a stunning achievement it represen ted in planning, technology, and execution. Through interviews, twenty-three thousand pages of NASA oral histories, and declassif ied CIA documents on the space race, Craig Nelson re-creates a vi vid and detailed account of the Apollo 11 mission. From the quoti dian to the scientific to the magical, readers are taken right in to the cockpit with Aldrin and Armstrong and behind the scenes at Mission Control. Rocket Men is the story of a twentieth-century pilgrimage; a voyage into the unknown motivated by politics, fai th, science, and wonder that changed the course of history. Edit orial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. In this extensi vely researched account of that epic achievement, former publishi ng executive and prize-winning author Nelson (The First Heroes) m oves seamlessly between Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin an d Collins, their nervous families and the equally nervous NASA gr ound crew. Nelson follows Armstrong in nail-biting detail as he t ries to find a place to land with less than a minuteÖs worth of f uel remaining. A large central section of the book digresses to p rovide some backstory on the feverish American-Soviet game of one -upmanship in the year leading up to the Apollo 11 launch. For in stance, Nelson describes Apollo 8 as an almost reckless gamble by NASA to beat the Russians in sending men to orbit the moon The b ook also describes the sad personal toll the mission took. Collin s was best able to deal with the cost of fame yet expressed the a nticlimax of life after Apollo 11: I seem gripped by earthly ennu i. Space fans and readers who remember that momentous time will f ind this an exciting read. (June 29) Copyright ® Reed Business I nformation, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* Using interviews, NASA oral hist ories, and declassified CIA material, Nelson has produced a magni ficent, very readable account of the steps that led to the succes s of Apollo 11. In the 40 years since the first moon landing and the 52 years since Sputnik was launched, it isn't always remember ed now what an experiment the Apollo program was, nor that the sp ace race was as much a military as a scientific campaign. The spa ce program was launched using the knowledge of rockets available at the end of World War II and former Third Reich scientists work ing in both American and Soviet programs. When it came to sending men into orbit and beyond, routines and equipment had to be inve nted and tested in minute increments. Nelson's descriptions take us back, showing the assorted teams and how they worked together. We meet the astronauts and find out why they were eager to take on this mission, and we also meet the hypercareful technicians, w ithout whom neither men nor craft would have left the ground. Nel son shows, too, how the technology and the politics of the times interrelated. Leslie Fish, songwriter, summed it up perfectly, To all the unknown heroes, sing out to every shore / What makes one step a giant leap is all the steps before. Nelson brightly illum inates those steps. --Frieda Murray About the Author Craig Nelso n has been a vice president and executive editor of Harper & Row, Hyperion, Random House, and Villard, and a literary agent. He is the author of several books, including Thomas Paine, winner of t he 2007 Henry Adams Prize. He has been profiled in Variety, Inter view, Publishers Weekly, and Time Out. From The Washington Post From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost To under stand how completely Apollo 11 dominates the history of the space program, consider for a moment the previous mission, Apollo 10. The astronauts on that one were . . . um . . . hold on . . . Goog ling as we speak . . . John Young, Eugene Cernan and Thomas Staff ord. All they did was get in a capsule atop a 30-story rocket, bl ast off the planet and fly all the freakin' way to the moon. Two of them then got into a contraption called a lunar module and des cended toward the moon's surface. Down, down they went. But they didn't land, because this was just a practice run for lunar orbit rendezvous. The glory of the first lunar landing would be reserv ed for the next mission. Indeed, to ensure that no eager-beaver a stronaut would say to heck with it and try to land, NASA didn't g ive the ascent module enough fuel to leave the moon's surface. Th e astronauts would have been stranded if they'd ignored orders. A nd so they dutifully flew home, their mission soon lost in the gl are of Apollo 11. Forty years on, the space program is still stru ggling to figure out how to top the fabled moonshot of July 1969. Apollo 11 may have been the greatest achievement in spaceflight, but arguably, it nearly killed the space program. Because what d o you do after you shoot the moon? You build a space shuttle. You build a space station. You launch telescopes. You dither around in low-Earth orbit for decades. But no matter what you do, you fi nd that Apollo 11 is an impossible act to follow. This summer, un der orders from President Obama, NASA's human spaceflight program is getting a soup-to-nuts review by a 10-person panel headed by former aerospace executive Norman Augustine. The committee will s pend a lot of time pondering rocket design (which do you prefer, the Ares 1 or an EELV?). But while racing toward an end-of-summer deadline, the committee will grapple with a more basic question: What are we doing in space? NASA currently plans to finish build ing the international space station and retire the shuttle, proba bly somewhere around the end of 2010. We're supposed to have a ne w fleet of spacecraft ready by about 2015. NASA hopes to put astr onauts on the moon again by 2020. This is not an Apollo-style rus h job but an incremental expansion of our presence in space, with a future Mars mission lurking as a remote possibility. Taxpayers are likely to ask an obvious question about a moonshot: Didn't w e already do that? Apollo 11 was something of a stunt, a flags-an d-footprints mission in which science got short shrift. But what a stunt! Craig Nelson's new book, Rocket Men, captures the drama and chaos of July 1969 and the almost unbearable tension of the m oon landing. When reporters knocked on astronaut spouse Joan Aldr in's door and started pelting her with inane questions soon after the Eagle set down on the Sea of Tranquillity, she screamed at t hem: Listen! Aren't you all excited? They did it! They did it! Ye ah: They did it, and they did it with smarts, pluck and -- agains t all odds in a technogeek culture -- style. Spaceflight requires exquisite planning as well as improvisation. Apollo 11 represent ed that in the extreme. Years in the making, with a supporting ca st of tens of thousands, the mission ultimately depended on Neil Armstrong flying the lunar module over a boulder field with only seconds of fuel to spare. Nelson describes the landing so vividly that the engrossed reader isn't sure that Armstrong and crewmate Buzz Aldrin are going to make it. Nelson places Apollo 11 in a b roader narrative of American engineering genius. Our society, he argues, does not adequately appreciate the technological feats th at make our culture possible: the big pipes, the vast roads, the power grids, the dams, and the people-and-cargo-carrying vehicles of heroic engineering and big science. He writes: Before the 199 0s' Silicon Valley entrepreneurs with their Red Bulls, boxed pizz a, and Cheetos, there were the short-sleeved-white-shirted denize ns of Houston's NASA with pocket protectors, Mexican takeout, eva porating hot-plate coffee, and ashtrays choked in smoldering ciga rette butts, and before them were New York and New Mexico's Manha ttan Project brain trust of alpha engineers in their fedoras and soft, floppy jackets. Everyone knew that spaceflight was dangerou s, but even so, the public was never told of the internal fears a nd uncertainties at NASA. Consider, for example, Apollo 8. It may have been an even more daring mission than the lunar landing. It was only the third flight of the giant Saturn V rocket, and the first with human beings in a capsule on top. NASA decided not onl y to launch a crew into orbit on the Saturn V but to send them al l the way to the moon, a quarter-million miles away. It came clos e to a suicide mission. Someone overheard a NASA official wonderi ng, before the launch, Just how do we tell Susan Borman, 'Frank i s stranded in orbit around the moon?' In many cases the astronau ts struggled to communicate exactly what it was like, being out t here in space. They spoke in jargon and acronyms. They stuck to t he engineering tasks at hand. The can-do attitude is so embedded in the space-cowboy psyche that it's almost impossible for the as tronauts to admit that the whole thing is shot through with uncer tainty, doubt, fear, occasional despair, a little bit of grief an d a lot of night sweats. Michael Collins, the third Apollo 11 cre wman, said that if someone asked him during a spaceflight how he felt about something, he'd answer, What? Huh? I don't know how I feel about that, you want the temperature, you want the pressure, you want the velocity, you want the altitude, what do you mean, how do I feel about that? Armstrong was a particularly taciturn f igure. He nearly died in a training exercise shortly before the A pollo 11 mission -- he had to eject and parachute to safety as hi s module training craft exploded -- then calmly returned to his o ffice and said nothing about it. No, he didn't have ice water in his veins -- his pulse hit 156 as he struggled to find a safe pla ce to land the lunar module -- but he was extraordinarily reserve d and remains to this day something of an enigma. Which makes Ald rin the most compelling Apollo figure: His new memoir, Magnificen t Desolation, describes how he was debilitated by depression and alcoholism soon after he returned from the moon. Aldrin plays dow n the significance of being second rather than first, but Nelson notes that when he got home he had to look at a commemorative sta mp showing the First Man on the Moon -- one guy! As though steppi ng onto the moon 20 minutes after Armstrong made him a rounding e rror. Another tidbit from Nelson: There are no good photographs o f Armstrong on the moon. Aldrin, um, kind of forgot to take any. So the most iconic shots of a spaceman on the moon were taken by Armstrong and show Aldrin. Nelson has a dim view of NASA's achiev ements since Apollo, particularly compared with that initial burs t of technological brilliance in which rockets went from weapons to spaceships: A mere twenty-five years from guided missile to ma n on the Moon, and then . . . nothing. Which is too harsh, by far . Raise your hand if you watched the astronauts fix the Hubble te lescope this spring. It was spaceflight at its finest. The shuttl e, derided as a mere space truck, never quite got its due (indeed , it can perform many feats that the next generation of spacecraf t couldn't possibly achieve). But even if he's a bit dyspeptic ab out current space programs, Nelson is surely correct in the main: We've never matched Apollo 11. There will be more marvelous achi evements in space, but it's not clear how many of them will be by flesh-and-blood creatures, or by Americans. The Augustine commit tee members, busy as they are figuring out our destiny in space, should bone up on Apollo 11. It was a bit like Babe Ruth pointing to a spot in the distant bleachers before belting a home run to that exact location. But it was also great engineering and dazzli ng human bravado. And it was the kind of thing that great nations do. achenbachj@washpost Copyright 2009, The Washington Post . All Rights Reserved. ., Viking Adult, 2009, 3<

2020, ISBN: 9780670021031

Viking Adult. Very Good. 6.42 x 1.41 x 9.58 inches. Hardcover. 2009. 416 pages. <br>A richly detailed and dramatic account of one of t he greatest achievements of humankind At 9:32… More...

Viking Adult. Very Good. 6.42 x 1.41 x 9.58 inches. Hardcover. 2009. 416 pages. <br>A richly detailed and dramatic account of one of t he greatest achievements of humankind At 9:32 A.M. on July 16, 1 969, the Apollo 11 rocket launched in the presence of more than a million spectators who had gathered to witness a truly historic event. It carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins t o the last frontier of human imagination: the moon. Rocket Men i s the thrilling story of the moon mission, and it restores the my stery and majesty to an event that may have become too familiar f or most people to realize what a stunning achievement it represen ted in planning, technology, and execution. Through interviews, twenty-three thousand pages of NASA oral histories, and declassif ied CIA documents on the space race, Craig Nelson re-creates a vi vid and detailed account of the Apollo 11 mission. From the quoti dian to the scientific to the magical, readers are taken right in to the cockpit with Aldrin and Armstrong and behind the scenes at Mission Control. Rocket Men is the story of a twentieth-century pilgrimage; a voyage into the unknown motivated by politics, fai th, science, and wonder that changed the course of history. Edit orial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. In this extensi vely researched account of that epic achievement, former publishi ng executive and prize-winning author Nelson (The First Heroes) m oves seamlessly between Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin an d Collins, their nervous families and the equally nervous NASA gr ound crew. Nelson follows Armstrong in nail-biting detail as he t ries to find a place to land with less than a minuteÖs worth of f uel remaining. A large central section of the book digresses to p rovide some backstory on the feverish American-Soviet game of one -upmanship in the year leading up to the Apollo 11 launch. For in stance, Nelson describes Apollo 8 as an almost reckless gamble by NASA to beat the Russians in sending men to orbit the moon The b ook also describes the sad personal toll the mission took. Collin s was best able to deal with the cost of fame yet expressed the a nticlimax of life after Apollo 11: I seem gripped by earthly ennu i. Space fans and readers who remember that momentous time will f ind this an exciting read. (June 29) Copyright ® Reed Business I nformation, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* Using interviews, NASA oral hist ories, and declassified CIA material, Nelson has produced a magni ficent, very readable account of the steps that led to the succes s of Apollo 11. In the 40 years since the first moon landing and the 52 years since Sputnik was launched, it isn't always remember ed now what an experiment the Apollo program was, nor that the sp ace race was as much a military as a scientific campaign. The spa ce program was launched using the knowledge of rockets available at the end of World War II and former Third Reich scientists work ing in both American and Soviet programs. When it came to sending men into orbit and beyond, routines and equipment had to be inve nted and tested in minute increments. Nelson's descriptions take us back, showing the assorted teams and how they worked together. We meet the astronauts and find out why they were eager to take on this mission, and we also meet the hypercareful technicians, w ithout whom neither men nor craft would have left the ground. Nel son shows, too, how the technology and the politics of the times interrelated. Leslie Fish, songwriter, summed it up perfectly, To all the unknown heroes, sing out to every shore / What makes one step a giant leap is all the steps before. Nelson brightly illum inates those steps. --Frieda Murray About the Author Craig Nelso n has been a vice president and executive editor of Harper & Row, Hyperion, Random House, and Villard, and a literary agent. He is the author of several books, including Thomas Paine, winner of t he 2007 Henry Adams Prize. He has been profiled in Variety, Inter view, Publishers Weekly, and Time Out. From The Washington Post From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com To under stand how completely Apollo 11 dominates the history of the space program, consider for a moment the previous mission, Apollo 10. The astronauts on that one were . . . um . . . hold on . . . Goog ling as we speak . . . John Young, Eugene Cernan and Thomas Staff ord. All they did was get in a capsule atop a 30-story rocket, bl ast off the planet and fly all the freakin' way to the moon. Two of them then got into a contraption called a lunar module and des cended toward the moon's surface. Down, down they went. But they didn't land, because this was just a practice run for lunar orbit rendezvous. The glory of the first lunar landing would be reserv ed for the next mission. Indeed, to ensure that no eager-beaver a stronaut would say to heck with it and try to land, NASA didn't g ive the ascent module enough fuel to leave the moon's surface. Th e astronauts would have been stranded if they'd ignored orders. A nd so they dutifully flew home, their mission soon lost in the gl are of Apollo 11. Forty years on, the space program is still stru ggling to figure out how to top the fabled moonshot of July 1969. Apollo 11 may have been the greatest achievement in spaceflight, but arguably, it nearly killed the space program. Because what d o you do after you shoot the moon? You build a space shuttle. You build a space station. You launch telescopes. You dither around in low-Earth orbit for decades. But no matter what you do, you fi nd that Apollo 11 is an impossible act to follow. This summer, un der orders from President Obama, NASA's human spaceflight program is getting a soup-to-nuts review by a 10-person panel headed by former aerospace executive Norman Augustine. The committee will s pend a lot of time pondering rocket design (which do you prefer, the Ares 1 or an EELV?). But while racing toward an end-of-summer deadline, the committee will grapple with a more basic question: What are we doing in space? NASA currently plans to finish build ing the international space station and retire the shuttle, proba bly somewhere around the end of 2010. We're supposed to have a ne w fleet of spacecraft ready by about 2015. NASA hopes to put astr onauts on the moon again by 2020. This is not an Apollo-style rus h job but an incremental expansion of our presence in space, with a future Mars mission lurking as a remote possibility. Taxpayers are likely to ask an obvious question about a moonshot: Didn't w e already do that? Apollo 11 was something of a stunt, a flags-an d-footprints mission in which science got short shrift. But what a stunt! Craig Nelson's new book, Rocket Men, captures the drama and chaos of July 1969 and the almost unbearable tension of the m oon landing. When reporters knocked on astronaut spouse Joan Aldr in's door and started pelting her with inane questions soon after the Eagle set down on the Sea of Tranquillity, she screamed at t hem: Listen! Aren't you all excited? They did it! They did it! Ye ah: They did it, and they did it with smarts, pluck and -- agains t all odds in a technogeek culture -- style. Spaceflight requires exquisite planning as well as improvisation. Apollo 11 represent ed that in the extreme. Years in the making, with a supporting ca st of tens of thousands, the mission ultimately depended on Neil Armstrong flying the lunar module over a boulder field with only seconds of fuel to spare. Nelson describes the landing so vividly that the engrossed reader isn't sure that Armstrong and crewmate Buzz Aldrin are going to make it. Nelson places Apollo 11 in a b roader narrative of American engineering genius. Our society, he argues, does not adequately appreciate the technological feats th at make our culture possible: the big pipes, the vast roads, the power grids, the dams, and the people-and-cargo-carrying vehicles of heroic engineering and big science. He writes: Before the 199 0s' Silicon Valley entrepreneurs with their Red Bulls, boxed pizz a, and Cheetos, there were the short-sleeved-white-shirted denize ns of Houston's NASA with pocket protectors, Mexican takeout, eva porating hot-plate coffee, and ashtrays choked in smoldering ciga rette butts, and before them were New York and New Mexico's Manha ttan Project brain trust of alpha engineers in their fedoras and soft, floppy jackets. Everyone knew that spaceflight was dangerou s, but even so, the public was never told of the internal fears a nd uncertainties at NASA. Consider, for example, Apollo 8. It may have been an even more daring mission than the lunar landing. It was only the third flight of the giant Saturn V rocket, and the first with human beings in a capsule on top. NASA decided not onl y to launch a crew into orbit on the Saturn V but to send them al l the way to the moon, a quarter-million miles away. It came clos e to a suicide mission. Someone overheard a NASA official wonderi ng, before the launch, Just how do we tell Susan Borman, 'Frank i s stranded in orbit around the moon?' In many cases the astronau ts struggled to communicate exactly what it was like, being out t here in space. They spoke in jargon and acronyms. They stuck to t he engineering tasks at hand. The can-do attitude is so embedded in the space-cowboy psyche that it's almost impossible for the as tronauts to admit that the whole thing is shot through with uncer tainty, doubt, fear, occasional despair, a little bit of grief an d a lot of night sweats. Michael Collins, the third Apollo 11 cre wman, said that if someone asked him during a spaceflight how he felt about something, he'd answer, What? Huh? I don't know how I feel about that, you want the temperature, you want the pressure, you want the velocity, you want the altitude, what do you mean, how do I feel about that? Armstrong was a particularly taciturn f igure. He nearly died in a training exercise shortly before the A pollo 11 mission -- he had to eject and parachute to safety as hi s module training craft exploded -- then calmly returned to his o ffice and said nothing about it. No, he didn't have ice water in his veins -- his pulse hit 156 as he struggled to find a safe pla ce to land the lunar module -- but he was extraordinarily reserve d and remains to this day something of an enigma. Which makes Ald rin the most compelling Apollo figure: His new memoir, Magnificen t Desolation, describes how he was debilitated by depression and alcoholism soon after he returned from the moon. Aldrin plays dow n the significance of being second rather than first, but Nelson notes that when he got home he had to look at a commemorative sta mp showing the First Man on the Moon -- one guy! As though steppi ng onto the moon 20 minutes after Armstrong made him a rounding e rror. Another tidbit from Nelson: There are no good photographs o f Armstrong on the moon. Aldrin, um, kind of forgot to take any. So the most iconic shots of a spaceman on the moon were taken by Armstrong and show Aldrin. Nelson has a dim view of NASA's achiev ements since Apollo, particularly compared with that initial burs t of technological brilliance in which rockets went from weapons to spaceships: A mere twenty-five years from guided missile to ma n on the Moon, and then . . . nothing. Which is too harsh, by far . Raise your hand if you watched the astronauts fix the Hubble te lescope this spring. It was spaceflight at its finest. The shuttl e, derided as a mere space truck, never quite got its due (indeed , it can perform many feats that the next generation of spacecraf t couldn't possibly achieve). But even if he's a bit dyspeptic ab out current space programs, Nelson is surely correct in the main: We've never matched Apollo 11. There will be more marvelous achi evements in space, but it's not clear how many of them will be by flesh-and-blood creatures, or by Americans. The Augustine commit tee members, busy as they are figuring out our destiny in space, should bone up on Apollo 11. It was a bit like Babe Ruth pointing to a spot in the distant bleachers before belting a home run to that exact location. But it was also great engineering and dazzli ng human bravado. And it was the kind of thing that great nations do. achenbachj@washpost.com Copyright 2009, The Washington Post . All Rights Reserved. ., Viking Adult, 2009, 3<

2009, ISBN: 9780670021031

New York: Viking, 2009. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xii, 404 pages. Illustrations. Notes. Sources. Index. DJ has sticker residue and some wear and other soi… More...

New York: Viking, 2009. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xii, 404 pages. Illustrations. Notes. Sources. Index. DJ has sticker residue and some wear and other soiling. Black mark on bottom edge. Some soiling to fep and edges. One corner creased. Craig Nelson is the author of Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness and the New York Times bestseller, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, as well as several previous books, including The Age of Radiance (a PEN Award Finalist chosen as one of the year's best books by NBC News, the American Institute of Physics, Kirkus Reviews, and FlavorWire), The First Heroes, Thomas Paine (winner of the Henry Adams Prize), and Let's Get Lost (shortlisted for W.H. Smith's Book of the Year). His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, National Geographic, The New England Review, Popular Science, Reader's Digest, and a host of other publications. Derived from a Kirkus review: A thorough recountingas full in human terms as in scientific and technical detailof NASA's first manned Moon landing. Ever since that day, Jul. 16, 1969, when the Apollo 11 mission put its lunar module on the surface of the Moon and astronaut Neil Armstrong took the last long step down its ladder, critics have argued the purpose and strategic value of that incredibly daunting, expensive and risky project. In the capable hands of Nelson, however, those arguments simply give way to inspirational history. The event seems strangely remote, something brief and shining. The author's real achievement is the vivid re-creation of the atmosphere within the program, complete with unsolvable problems, oscillating team morale and serious career envy. For example, astronaut Buzz Aldrin was initially slotted to step first to the surface, but mission commander Armstrong exercised the privilege of rank. Nelson also offers lucid insights into the gilded bureaucracy of the space programNASA's tech-speak often served to isolate the press and public. Nelson capably decodes it as the tale unfolds., Viking, 2009, 3<