Puttering in the Study

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

This was an awful title for a book about Apollo 8 - because there's a 2010 book Rocket Men that's about Apollo 11 and also tells the Apollo 8 story. And I just read another book on Apollo 8 called Apollo 8, so I thought the notices I was getting for the new Rocket Men about Apollo 8 were mistakes.

But of course I bought it. And read it in less than 24 hours.

The bad thing about Kindle, and to a lesser extent Audible, is that every book looks alike, so I have no memory any longer which book said what.  I don't think I liked this book more than Jeffrey Kluger's which I listened to a few months ago (I think - I'm not even sure any more) or the relevant parts of the other Rocket Men - which tells this story as well and which I think I listened to again not long ago, or Chaikin's A Man on the Moon which also tells it.  Or the relevant episode of From the Earth to the Moon.  

I certainly didn't read anything I didn't like or didn't think was well-done, and I do think I read things I hadn't seen before.  But I'd be hard-pressed to tell anyone what the best telling of Apollo 8 is. 

The one thing that this book did impress on me - which others had as well, but perhaps it did tell it better - was what an enormous gamble Apollo 8 was, in a desperate attempt to get to the moon before an expected early December 1968 mission by the Soviet Union.  Russia had a similarly not completely tested rocket and capsule, and decided against risking a two cosmonaut crew on a translunar mission which would have beat Apollo 8 by a couple of weeks.  The author indicates that the historical record supports the conclusion that the USSR did not launch because it couldn't believe Apollo 8 actually would.  And for various reason it nearly didn't. 

The reason why a failure was particularly horrible to contemplate is something both NASA's director and its commander Frank Borman's wife contemplated. Had it failed, the most likely outcome would have been that on Christmas Day 1968 the nation would have learned that three American astronauts were marooned beyond any hope of rescue in their spacecraft orbiting the Moon.  For the next several days the world would have looked up knowing they were there, gradually running out of oxygen, and after they died, the Moon would have been the place their corpses orbited around indefinitely, until their orbit decayed and their CSM crashed onto the surface. And every Christmas Day would have reminded us. Neither the Apollo 1 fire nor the space shuttle disasters - one at launch and one at reentry - would have left such a mark on mankind.  Not even 9/11, with its far greater loss of life, left a mark like that.  And it would have been precisely because NASA gambled that it could get a mission - unprecedented in so many ways - ready in four months, instead of a year. 

Instead, it was Apollo 8 that allowed NASA to absorb the delays in development of the lunar module that were pushing it beyond its 1969 deadline and to fend off a Soviet program that was almost ready to send cosmonauts around the moon and claim victory in the space race.  Because while we today see the landing of men on the moon as the actual victory, a successful circumlunar flight by the USSR instead of the US might have resulted in the issue being perceived as at best a tie, and at worst caused the US to dispense with a landing program either at all, or at least one that would have gotten there before the Soviets.  History shows that enthusiasm for the program waned quickly after the first landings.  Perhaps it would have done so once the Soviets got there.

Anyway, that's why I keep reading anything I can find on the Apollo program.  It's patriotism and human achievement rolled into one.

The Hellfire Club - Jake Tapper

This is the story of a fictional 1950's congressman who gets pulled into McCarthy-era politics - sort of a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  Its sex appeal is supposed to be the historical characters that recur throughout - the up and coming Senator Kennedy, who conveniently lives a few doors down from the freshman congressman, Senate minority leader Lyndon Johnson who conveniently rides the tram to the Capitol and deigns to explain Democratic politics to the new congressman's intern, and so forth. Actually, the name dropping isn't as egregious as it could be, and it largely stops shortly after the book gets going other than McCarthy and his associate Roy Cohn, both of who may get the emphasis they do because of their similarities to and relationship to Donald Trump.  A bit of speculation on my part, but not much of one.

The plot is okay, but I had an enormous problem with the original thesis for the book - a prominent New Yorker pulls strings to get his son appointed as a congressman to fill a vacant seat.  Because that can't happen - there are no appointments to vacant House seats as there are for Senate ones.  As Barbara Jordan was proud of saying when I was in her Policy Development class - it is the "People's House" - no one gets there without an election. (This happened on Sept. 30, 1987 - my note reads:

HOUSE - "People's House"

and I can still hear the pride in her voice at the requirement that every Member must have been elected.

Now this is explained in one of the first Notes at the end of the book - Tapper states that for purposes of getting a naive House freshman as a protagonist he deliberately ignored this rule.  And he tweaked other indicia of reality as you'd expect in a piece of historical fiction - the new rep wouldn't have been named to Appropriations in 1954, for example, because freshman weren't eligible until 1970.  Historical incidents get different years, and so forth.  All of which are fine and help him tell a story.  It just struck me as odd that he'd violate such a basic rule in a book that is about inside politics without a wink to it for those familiar with the way appointments work.  For example he could have claimed that there was an obscure workaround to the rule in New York, and I'd have recognized "okay, this is for plot purposes."  But having had BJ impress it on me, it was a false note throughout the book.

The book itself is not what I'd call well-written.  It's never bad, but at least to my eyes it stumbles frequently in ways an editor should have caught.  For example, it would have benefited considerably from being read aloud, where the clinks in the dialogue would have become clear.  An example - our hero and his sidekick meet at the White Horse Tavern, and then rush off, during which our hero says "why didn't you show me X?"  Sidekick says "I was going to show it to you at the White Horse Tavern but ..."

Seriously?  No one would say that.  They'd say "I was going to show you at the restaurant, but ..." Or when a husband and wife refer to someone they both know by first and last name, or (to a lesser extent) using a title. Those are easy mistakes to correct.  Otherwise, the writing is serviceable.  (I would have corrected where he notes that at D-Day he rode in a landing craft from his "battleship" but that's my problem, not most readers').

The name dropping with appearances from Jack, Jackie and Bobby is actually not poorly done. Much of it has a historical basis, and at least the principal legislative characters in the book aren't Kennedys, Johnson and Nixon - they're either fictional House committee chairs or the now-forgotten Sen. Estes Kefauver.

One other thing.  It is an automatic F to have a fictional rubber company named "Goodstone" (get it?  As in Goodyear and Bridgestone?).  Also, a letter grade down which a major company is "General Kinetics." Come on - you can do better than that.

Anyway, not a bad read, but Dan Brown doesn't need to be looking over his shoulder any time soon.

Biggest Brother: The Life Of Major Dick Winters, The Man Who Led The Band of Brothers - Larry Alexander

Band of Brothers is a cult classic around our house, and I've bought the DVD twice (lost the first set) and the BluRay after that. I have read the book on which it is based, but don't recall much about it, so when I saw that there was a biography of Easy Company's commander Major Dick Winters, I wanted to see what it could add.

As BoB viewers know, Winters is the almost superhuman leader in the series, and from training camp through the end of the war and beyond he's the character you want to see.  The book is refreshing because it both enhances that impression by providing even more instances of Winters' leadership, while simultaneously humanizing him a bit.  In the series he appears a bit old-maid-ish at times, and at least initially appears as a bit of a religious pacificist.  He was religious, but rejected the idea of avoiding service as a conscientious objector based on his religion, and in combat and in his postwar comments appears to have had no qualms about killing, profanity (sexual profanity did bother him, at least in the context of the TV series), the looting of Nazi assets, etc.  Nonetheless he was correctly portrayed as a straight arrow, avoiding alcohol and womanizing. 

The books tells many interesting stories about his service, and essentially covers everything you see in the series, but with additional detail and context.  After the war ended, Winters had some trouble adjusting to peacetime life, and it wasn't until middle age that he seemed to hit his stride, heading into a magnificent retirement that including managing the Easy Company veterans' stories from his home office at his farm.  It was then that he met Stephen Ambrose and persuaded him the the story of Easy Company was worth telling, after which he became famous - especially when Tom Hanks turned the book into an award-winning TV mini-series. 

After the series won an Emmy, he went on stage and thanked the audience for recognizing the soldiers' story and then saluted them for their support.  Easy Company's surviving veterans were watching his remarks in a nearby ballroom.

The book begins with that story, and it's a great one.  The book also has materials that Ambrose and Hanks didn't, which adds more detail to the story.  If you're interested in the story of Easy Company, this is a must-read.

Berlin: Portrait of a City Through the Centuries - Rory MacLean

This was an extraordinarily interesting book.  It tells the history of Berlin from its earliest years in a series of sketches of individuals.  From poor men and women to historical figures, some of which you recognize but most of which you don't, it puts together a puzzle of what Berlin is and what is has been.

For some reason, when we visited Germany and Berlin a few years back it was far and away my favorite place.  Not because of the history, because compared to the rest of Europe there isn't much left standing of it, but it just felt like home.  I literally forgot I wasn't in East Texas while riding the train through the pine forests back to the ship.  So while the stories are usually horrible ones, the underlying theme is that people lived here and tried to make a life for themselves, and their stories aren't so different from those in other places - at least at times.

I frequently note that a book is well-written, but still isn't a particularly good book.  This book is not like that at all.  It's well-crafted, startlingly original, and tells a memorable story.

The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession - Charlie Lovett

You can always tell when I'm looking for a new book to read because I'll get something like this, because Amazon tells me that people who love books like it.

It's the story of an autistic young man who searches for rare books while grieving for his deceased wife, who was his college sweetheart. It's a bit of a cross between DaVinci Code and Rain Man.   The plot itself is a little difficult to follow, but the love story between the young man and his wife after they meet in college is really sweet, and telling the story through his efforts to overcome his autistic tendencies.  I enjoyed it, and might read some more Lovett after this.

Munich - Robert Harris

I am way behind on posting about books I've read recently, so let me start with Robert Harris' latest, Munich.  The book tells the story of the infamous 1938 conference through the eyes of assistants to the two principals, Chamberlain and Hitler.  I listened to this one, and while I didn't enjoy it as much as the author's last, Conclave, it was an interesting and informative read. 

In the end, the subject matter was so narrow that it read like an episode of The Crown.  English, terrifically crafted, and full of memorable characters, but the value was in the storytelling, not the story.  That's not to minimize the importance of the subject matter, but the story told - of two assistants whose involvement had no effect on the outcome - which I guess is a spoiler, but forgive me - was a very narrow one.  The benefit of reading it is that it makes one sort of a time traveler to the conference, experiencing the personalities without affecting the course of history.