Review by Booklist Review
British author (Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima, 2005) and filmmaker (Young@Heart, 2007) Walker makes use of declassified material from the former Soviet Union to uncover for English-speaking audiences the real story of Yuri Gagarin and the other Soviet cosmonauts who beat America in the race to get the first person into outer space. Alternating the saga of the Soviet spacemen with the better-known NASA astronauts, Walker paints the less familiar cosmonauts as three-dimensional characters, not the ideologically driven caricatures of Cold War propaganda machines. Gagarin and his comrades were held in strictest secrecy as they prepared for their rocket rides, and Walker reveals some surprising facts such as Soviet cosmonauts having to be relatively short in order to fit in the smaller Soviet capsules. Walker also lays bare some of NASA's own fudging of truth as in its hiding of one Mercury astronaut's extramarital affair. Those fascinated by space exploration as well as its geopolitical importance in the last half of the twentieth century will find themselves engrossed in this detailed history. Includes bibliographic notes.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Film director Walker (Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima) marks the 60th anniversary of the first manned space flight in April 1961 with this vivid account of the Cold War--era space race. Jumping back and forth between developments in the U.S. and the Soviet Union, Walker captures the uncertainty and tension of early test flights that sent stray dogs, a chimpanzee, and a mannequin named Ivan into space, and details covert intelligence-gathering operations, including a CIA mission to "kidnap" a key part of the Soviet R-7 rocket from an exhibition in Mexico City. The book's centerpiece is a dramatic, minute-by-minute account of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's ascent into orbit and near-catastrophic return to Earth (a faulty valve delayed his engine compartment from separating at the designated moment, threatening to destroy his capsule upon reentry into the atmosphere). Walker draws on archival records, memoirs, and interviews with family members to profile key players in the space race, including U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard (who reached space 23 days after Gagarin) and Russian rocket engineer Sergei Korolev, who was "removed from all public discourse" after 1957 in order to protect the secrecy of the Soviet missile program. This entertaining and carefully researched history achieves liftoff. (Apr.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
The Cold War was filled with anxiety and fear, but it also led to milestones in space exploration that were prompted by fierce competition between the USSR and the U.S. Walker provides a thrilling account of the first manned space flight, which began in total secrecy, concealed from the U.S. by the Iron Curtain. Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, a young Russian fighter pilot, became part of the Vanguard Six group of cosmonauts, and was soon thrust into fame as the first human to reach orbit. Gagarin was strapped into a tiny capsule the weight of a five-megaton nuclear bomb, where he had to suppress terrors of the mind that included panic attacks and claustrophobia. No one was sure what would happen to humans in space, or whether they could survive the massive thrust forces of a rocket launch. The United States was planning a similar launch into space, but whichever superpower completed this mission first would "score a massive technological, political, and ideological victory over the other." Walker, a film director, draws on extensive original research and takes readers behind the scenes of one of humanity's greatest adventures. VERDICT A great introduction to the gripping tale of Gagarin's flight and its impact on space exploration history.--Gary Medina, El Camino Coll., Torrance, CA
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Energetic history of the first years of the space race, focusing on Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968). Partly because they were late coming to the atomic bomb, the Soviets were determined not to lose ground in the space race. Consequently, writes popular historian and documentary director Walker, the ministry of defense requisitioned ground "four times the size of Greater London," at first called Leninsky, where engineers developed the largest rocket in the world. Several rockets had exploded before they got one into space containing two dogs, proof that living things could survive the experience. Soon it was pilot hero Gagarin's turn. Chosen from a huge group of candidates steadily winnowed down to six--we know this, Walker writes, thanks to a diary a high official in the program surreptitiously kept--Gagarin had strong competition with a fighter pilot named Pavel Popovich, who was ruled out because he was Ukrainian. "Even as the Soviet Union's propagandists paid lip service to the socialist ideals of ethnic equality," notes Walker, "Popovich's origin was a handicap." Though not the first historian to recount the Soviet Vostok program and its successors, the author does good work in contrasting it in detail with the American astronaut program (John Glenn would orbit the planet less than a year after Gagarin). Of particular interest is Walker's investigation of the origins of the American determination to be the first to land on the moon, driven by John Kennedy's bitter recognition of America's defeat; he asked advisers, "Can we leapfrog them? Is there any place we can catch them? What can we do?" The answer was Apollo, a "distant and uncertain adventure that Kennedy himself had effectively quashed in the latest round of NASA's budget cuts." On the human front, Walker's depiction of Gagarin's succumbing to the "rock star" syndrome after his orbit, a feat he would never again match, is especially affecting. A welcome addition to the literature of space exploration, shedding light on the Soviet contribution. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
