posted 12-17-2008 01:37 AM               

A stunning investigation of the roots of the first moon landing forty years ago. This illuminating story of the dawn of the space age reaches back to the reactionary modernism of the Third Reich, using the life of “rocket scientist” Wernher von Braun as its narrative path through the crumbling of Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazi regime. Von Braun, a blinkered opportunist who could apply only tunnel vision to his meteoric career, stands as an archetype of myriad twentieth century technologists who thrived under regimes of military secrecy and unlimited money. His seamless transformation from developer of the deadly V-2 ballistic missile for Hitler to an American celebrity as the supposed genius behind the golden years of the U.S. space program in the 1950s and 1960s raises haunting questions about the culture of the Cold War, the shared values of technology in totalitarian and democratic societies, and the imperatives of material progress.

About the Author

Wayne Biddle won a Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times reporting on the “Star Wars” anti-missile project. He has written three nonfiction books and is a member of the writing seminars faculty at the Johns Hopkins University. He lives near Baltimore, Maryland.

• Hardcover: 288 pages
  
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. (July 20, 2009)
  
• ISBN-10: 0393059103
  
• ISBN-13: 978-0393059106

posted 12-17-2008 11:46 PM               

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Originally posted by GoesTo11:
...the blurb makes this book sound awfully polemical

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