Some Space Book Reviews (mostly good)

LINKS TO RECENT SPACE BOOK REVIEWS

Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew

By Michael Leinbach and Johnathan Ward. Arcade Publishing, 2018

The Columbia disaster was a horrible day in history, made worse by the knowledge it was preventable.  The authors tell that story, but they also tell the story of hope and dedication and that old-fashioned and much-maligned thing called the American spirit. 

Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System: The First 100 Missions. Dennis R. Jenkins, published by the author, 2001.

What Jenkins did here is phenomenal. No other book on the Shuttle or any other spacecraft provides this level of authoritative detail. Every idea, version, and system is here in words and diagrams.

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon, by Robert Kurson, 2018.  It's hard to express how much I enjoyed Rocket Men. I was an "Apollo kid" and something of a space historian myself, so I knew the story, but what the author does here is make us FEEL it. (Caution: there's another space history book called Rocket Men: not nearly as good.)

Live from Cape Canaveral: Covering the Space Race from Sputnik to Today

Jay Barbee, Smithsonian, 2007.  Journalist Jay Barbree had a front-row seat to much of the American program.  It's a fun read, although it feels a bit too much like the reader is on a rushed tour bus, hitting the highlights with some pauses for personal interludes. You will learn some new stuff, though!

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen, 2012.  

I wanted to like this book by a respected (formerly, anyway) journalist on a fascinating topic. Some of the airplane test stories are good.  But a ton of research is undone with careless misreporting on several projects and a "Soviet/Mengele" Roswell crash theory that is batshit crazy. 

Riding Rockets, by Mike Mullane

Three-time Shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane has produced a unique memoir of his time with NASA. It offers more than you want to know about space bathrooms along with good portraits of fellow astronauts and his own stories: lots of fun.

Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11 by James Donovan,  Little, Brown and Company, 2019

There are more Apollo books than there are rocks on the moon, but stories can always be told better. There are mistakes in the pre-Apollo chapters, but the story of the Apollo program is first-rate, covering everything from personalities (to the engineering-focused Buzz Aldrin, "small talk was a foreign langiuage" - wow,has Buzz changed)  to politics and engineering.