Book Review: Rocket Men

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon
Robert Kurson
History, space

Rocket Men is a good illustration of the difference between "a good book" and "a good book for a specific audience." The specific audience, in this case, is space nuts (of whom I am one). If you grew up drinking Tang and knowing the difference between a Redstone and an Atlas booster, so are you, and you'll like this book. It's got rockets, heroic astronauts, heroic engineering, and the Moon: enough said. 

A more detached view takes in some of Rocket Men's limitations. The chief of these is that Kurson spends the bigger part of his book on the smaller part of his story. He starts out by making a strong case that the decision to send the Apollo 8 mission--it was aggressively brought forward--was a daring one, taken to respond to pressure from the Soviets, and requiring considerable technical bravado. Having done that, he spends most of his page count on an hour-by-hour recounting of the mission itself, which went as smoothly as such things ever did. The real drama, in other words, is in the preparation, and Kurson shortchanges it.

It's the enthusiast's dilemma. What gets Robert Kurson's pulse pounding is the adventure in space, in the same way as a sports enthusiast is excited about the game itself. That leads him to overbalance the book. It edges his astronaut biographies near to starry-eyed hero-worship. It makes his writing a little more fervent than the facts may warrant--he overuses, for example, the would-be-dramatic single-sentence paragraph.

None of this is meant as a slam. Rocket Men is an enjoyable read. It's just that it's much more enjoyable if you're already a fan.