Space

Rating:
Summary: an imaginative journey into space exploration
Review: In spite of the thickness, I wrote this book in a relatively short time. The Michener novel in fact is very fluent, pleasant and interesting with its historical arguments, such as the careful description of Peenemunde Base and the birth of space technology.

Rating:
Summary: Inaccurate and self-serving
Review: In the 1960s my husband worked for NASA in Houston. He helped develop the photography program used by the Gemini and Apollo astronauts -- he trained them, evaluated their photography and cataloged the results. We were there. We KNOW what the program was. We saw it and knew the people involved.

Michener's SPACE almost turned me off on historical fiction for good. His inaccuracies are so overwhelming that they are disgusting and so many that it would take volumes to refute them. Perhaps the author relied too much on mediocre research assistants. He was, after all, getting old when he wrote the book.

Sunnye Tiedemann (aka Ruth F. Tiedemann)

Rating:
Summary: Almost Perfect
Review: It is hard to believe that anyone who has a real interest in space, NASA, etc hasn't read this book, but in fact I just finished it reading it after 20 years of fascination with just those things. I love Michener's blending of fact and fiction. His characters are very realistic and natural. However, I did find that the book dragged in the last 50 pages or so as he searched for an ending. If you enjoy reading about NASA then you must read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Tapestry of Science and Society
Review: It was a timely coincidence I decided to read this book in 2004, twenty-two years after it was originally published. Ordinarily I am put off by 800 page books, especially historical fiction. However, this one was different. It grabbed and held me. Challenging, absorbing, dramatic, stimulating, and meaningful are a few of the adjectives that come to mind.

Michener has dramatized the first advent of man into space in a marvelously cohesive and illuminating fashion. The characters he creates are not meant to be historical, but instead they represent the richness and variety of human nature that almost miraculously have to come together in order to achieve an important and demanding task.

Alongside these brave men--and occasionally in front of them-- we find their unique wives and their families, sometimes with values agonizingly different from their parents. But the main task is to harness all of their energy to the pressing and onerous task of doing something nearly, but not quite, impossible -- lifting tons of metal far beyond the grasp of Earth's gravity and guiding it unerringly to bull'seye targets millions of miles away.

Michener's story begins during World War II where American war heroes and German rocket scientists alternately share the narrative. Their diverse lives are seamlessly woven into a rich tapestry that eventually becomes the spectacular American space initiative.

In exploring the scientific and engineering conquest of space the danger for an author is that it could become monotonously technical. Michener neatly avoids this danger by interspersing a running commentary on the revolution in social conditions that germinated and developed in American during this turbulent time. Not only is outer space explored, but also, the inner space of life in America.

Michener examines the widely varied backgrounds, goals, and motivations of the astronauts, their wives, their families, and their political and social leaders. An amazing assortment of contemporary social issues are brought in: minority representation, fragmented but successful marriages, the politics of funding science, the devisiveness of the Vietnam war, homosexuality, and the effect of religious fundamentalism on science are but a few of the issues. All this is in addition to the thrilling resourcefulness of the highly select group of astronauts as they skillfully battle the elements of nature-- not always successfully.

This book is a spectacular amalgamation of science and society. Like a masterful painting it captures many essential elements that could never be present at one time in a even the most carefully posed photograph. From these many strands Michener weaves a fascinating fabric of the most courageous scientific and engineering accomplishment of man-- the conquest of outer space.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Tapestry of Science and Society
Review: It was a timely coincidence I decided to read this book in 2004, twenty-two years after it was originally published. Ordinarily I am put off by 800 page books, especially historical fiction. However, this one was different. It grabbed and held me. Challenging, absorbing, dramatic, stimulating, and meaningful are a few of the adjectives that come to mind.

Michener has dramatized the first advent of man into space in a marvelously cohesive and illuminating fashion. The characters he creates are not meant to be historical, but instead they represent the richness and variety of human nature that almost miraculously have to come together in order to achieve an important and demanding task.

Alongside these brave men--and occasionally in front of them-- we find their unique wives and their families, sometimes with values agonizingly different from their parents. But the main task is to harness all of their energy to the pressing and onerous task of doing something nearly, but not quite, impossible -- lifting tons of metal far beyond the grasp of Earth's gravity and guiding it unerringly to bull'seye targets millions of miles away.

Michener's story begins during World War II where American war heroes and German rocket scientists alternately share the narrative. Their diverse lives are seamlessly woven into a rich tapestry that eventually becomes the spectacular American space initiative.

In exploring the scientific and engineering conquest of space the danger for an author is that it could become monotonously technical. Michener neatly avoids this danger by interspersing a running commentary on the revolution in social conditions that germinated and developed in American during this turbulent time. Not only is outer space explored, but also, the inner space of life in America.

Michener examines the widely varied backgrounds, goals, and motivations of the astronauts, their wives, their families, and their political and social leaders. An amazing assortment of contemporary social issues are brought in: minority representation, fragmented but successful marriages, the politics of funding science, the devisiveness of the Vietnam war, homosexuality, and the effect of religious fundamentalism on science are but a few of the issues. All this is in addition to the thrilling resourcefulness of the highly select group of astronauts as they skillfully battle the elements of nature-- not always successfully.

This book is a spectacular amalgamation of science and society. Like a masterful painting it captures many essential elements that could never be present at one time in a even the most carefully posed photograph. From these many strands Michener weaves a fascinating fabric of the most courageous scientific and engineering accomplishment of man-- the conquest of outer space.

Rating:
Summary: Fiction that teaches
Review: James Michener has talent for weaving fictional characters into historical events. The book never slowed down for me.

Rating:
Summary: Takes forever to build up
Review: Let me tell you. I listened to the abridged version on audio cassette and it was long and boring as anything I've read. But as another reviewer pointed out the scene on the Moon is captivating. It's worth wading through this book for this ending. But if you looking for SF, look elsewhere. Oh yeah, where in the heck is Freemont?

Rating:
Summary: Well Written, yet poorly edited
Review: Michener rambled on way too long for my liking about insignificant things such as small characters with no meaning to the plot. The Kolfs were extremely well written, yet I found that the Pope's and the Mott's were the ideal American perfect family people, especially the Pope's. Senator and Mrs. Grant, on the other hand were perfectly written. The book definetly has ups and downs, and turns into more of a slow read, than the fast pacing that was Michener's style.

Rating:
Summary: Only One Flaw.
Review: Mr Michener is justly famous for the amount of research he put into his many fine books. And 'Space' is no exception. He gives us an excellent microcosm of the political, scientific and social happenings in America during a forty year period. It seems that America itself is a character in this novel. And that we are to be rightly reminded that America's space program was and is an important part of society and what shaped it from the late fifties to the early eighties. The characters are drawn with fine, masterly detail but because of Michener's prose style, we often feel detached from the emotions and trials of the characters. There is only one major flaw with this novel: While rich with relevant, never intrusive technical detail, the fictional Apollo 18 mission is clinically portrayed. A Lunar mission should be richly emotional and exciting, but Michener gives it to us like a 'textbook' retelling. While reading it, I almost wished the style would switch to a more conventional thriller genre. But would that have been out of place with the rest? Perhaps. All scholars of the American space program should read this book. And when will the overlong, yet spectacular Television mini-series made from this book finally become available on DVD and VHS? A word of advice to the producers: Cut it down from 12 hours to about 8 by removing a lot of the soap-opera stuff that wasn't in the book.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Blend of History and Politics
Review: Near the end of SPACE, published in 1982, the engineer-scientist Stanley Mott says that his pro-science political remarks are addressed to the world of 2002, which, as I write, begins 19 days from now. Having myself been integrally involved in the political fight here in Kansas [Fremont] against a true-life embodiment of the book's anti-science creationist, Strabismus, I was astonished when I read in SPACE the same tactics that have been used here the past few years. In 1999 the Kansas State School Board temporarily abandoned teaching legitimate science in favor of teaching the same fundamentalist doctrine described in this book. Astonishing foresight by Michener.

SPACE is spot-on accurate for its review of the history and poltics of the American space program, in which I worked from time to time. Tragically, it was always foreseeable that once the Moon was reached the program would falter. It took thirty years after the Moon flights before we finally had a space station, though it is only a shadow of what designers wanted.

I mention, because some reviewers do not know, that the fictional State of FREMONT is in-part a tribute to John C. Fremont and his wife Jesse Benton Fremont, about whom James Michener had previously written a book. Fremont's wife was from Missouri, where her father Thomas Hart Benton served as Senator. Little remembered now, a century-and-a-half ago John C. Fremont was America's most famous explorer-adventurer, political propagandist for "Manifest Destiny," and a Presidential candidate. The comparison with the "Manifest Destiny" of space is apparent. John Fremont spent much time in Kansas and his writings about Kansas's glories inspired many to move here. Michener's choice of name was apt.

The map in the novel indicates Fremont is the same shape as Kansas, straddling the States of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa. The map's indicated locations of the families correspond to the childhood homes of President's Hoover (Iowa), Truman (Missouri), Eisenhower (Kansas), and Ford (Nebraska). In general, the fictional state is intended to represent where most of our real astronauts from this era were from -- small towns in the Mid-West.

Many of the book's characters are real (such as Wernher Von Braun) and the history is accurate, though necessarily some characters are composites and some events are consolidated.

I highly recommend SPACE for anyone interested in the history, politics, and personalities of the roughly thirty-year era when the U.S.A. first went to the Moon. This would be suitable adjunct reading for a university course on this topic. In SPACE, Michener also expressly praises (not criticises) Tom Wolfe's, Norman Mailer's, and Michael Collin's books about the "Moon race."

Although we officially said that we went to the Moon "in peace for all mankind," we went mostly due to short term cold war domestic politics. Fortunately this enabled the true visionaries to live their dream of sending people to the Moon.

I have not seen -- and somehow had never heard of -- the six-part television mini-series SPACE, based on this book. I do hope that it is re-broadcast sometime, or eventually made otherwise available.