posted 01-12-2008 02:22 PM               

I can honestly say that without question it is the best book I have very read. Wow. I am totally loving it which is why I am going so slow because I want to savour it and I don't want it to end.

My favourite bits so far are the sections about the cosmonauts. I never really knew much about the early ones and since first reading it I have gained so much more respect for the Russian spaceflight pioneers. Titov sounds like he was quite a character.

posted 03-28-2008 05:30 PM               

We also spotted that UK bookseller Waterstones put the following recommendation online from one of their booksellers, Sarah Skinner:

posted 03-31-2008 10:37 AM               

Reviewer Matthew H. Hersch of The University of Pennsylvania points out a key reason why this book succeeds by stating "Rather than recounting the first five years of American and Soviet spaceflight in simple narrative form, the authors let the spacefarers(and would-be spacefarers like female aviator Wally Funk) speak for themselves through ten chronological character studies of figures familiar to spaceflight enthusiasts like first person in space Yuri Gagarin and the enigmatic and larger-than-life Project Mercury astronaut "Gordo" Cooper, who passed away while proofreading the manuscript. With unusual access to their sources, the authors enrich conventional accounts of these characters, walking a delicate line between history and hagiography."

Hersch goes on to say "They have indulged their sources and have been rewarded with a wealth of detail, some of it minor, but much of it intriguing to anyone attempting to figure out what was actually floating around in the heads of people floating around in space. (Titov imagined Earth as a grain of sand on a vast cosmic beach; then he barfed.)"

Hersch concludes with "Silent Sea may serve as an epitaph for these thoughtful men and women; then again, it may well be that history prefers to remember the first space travelers as a group of daredevils, blissful and simple, for whom no frontier was forbidden."

posted 07-14-2008 12:13 AM            

The second review is in the Summer 2008 edition of "Air Power History," a publication of the Air Force Historical Foundation. The review by Rick Sturdevant (Deputy Director of History, HQ Air Force Space Command) begins with:

After hundreds of books about the early years of human spaceflight, why should anyone be interested in one more? Someone who has read this book might have a positive answer. Rarely, in either the historical or biographical genres is a work so exceptional or so substantively and stylistically enticing, that the average person simply cannot put it down before reading it cover to cover. "Into That Silent Sea," the first volume in a series titled Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight, is that sort of book.

posted 10-07-2008 11:41 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by ColinBurgess:
At our suggestion, this time the book will include an index.

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posted 07-07-2015 01:04 PM            

As it turns out, the last book I read should have been, perhaps, the only one, because it contained every morsel I had gleaned from my prior reading and then some.

"Into That Silent Sea" was that last book, and in my estimation it is the finest single reference one can find on that first tumultuous lustrum in the most exciting period of human history.

French and Burgess have taken what, in the hands of lesser writers, would have been merely a dry enumeration of facts, and spun them, without sensationalizing, into a thrilling, cohesive account.