The Earth Gazers: On Seeing Ourselves

In this sweeping chronology of human flight, British writer Potter (How to Make a Human Being) traces aviation and rocketry from the WWI era into the space age. It’s a distracted narrative, and amid the vast cast of characters three influential pillars emerge: Robert Goddard (1882–1945), a pioneering rocketeer and a smart but often paranoid eccentric; Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974), who devoted his life to realizing “a new era of flight” but who came to believe that “neither aeronautics nor astronautics had been a boon to the human race”; and Wernher von Braun (1912–1977), Hitler’s rocket engineer and later “America’s chief advocate for space travel.” Potter’s parallel play-by-play accounts of the American and Soviet space programs offer an energetic supercut of crewed missions and astronaut life during the Cold War. He shows the ingenuity and daring needed to go from The Spirit of Saint Louis’s transatlantic crossing to Apollo 8’s lunar orbit. This grand scope ably highlights the interconnected nature of progress: “We could see men on the moon only because getting them to the moon had brought about a worldwide telecommunications system.” Throughout, readers receive brief technical explanations, rich primary-source research, and intimate biographical details of many recognizable figures. Potter’s story is one of individuals as much as of advancement, but the sum is less than its constituent parts. [em]Agent: Georgina Capel Associates. (Feb.) [/em]