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Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Those not already familiar with the Michener style need to know: He writes in a dry but gripping style, following the course of an epic subject from its roots all the way through its development. He follows many fictional personalities, drawn from distillations of types and backgrounds of actual participants. These are significant but not real historical figures, just under the 'level' of the famous and familiar. Real figures play their roles, but it's really their assistants we follow, learn to know and are made to feel for. They are normal people and there-in lies the 'American Dream' style: Normal people, whose merit earns success. Every step is earned by simple hard work and courage. This is the detail he delves into and makes interesting. We rejoice with our good peoples successes and rage at injustices and obstacles met around them.
This is a successful book in typical style, on a par with his 'Alaska' (which I preferred). It follows the pursuit of space flight from it beginnings, and builds its players from their roots upwards. Test pilots, senators, engineers, Committee executives, charlatans, wives, sons and daughters, some in several roles. It shows many of the steps needed to build up to space, and if perhaps not a techno thriller we are now familiar with it must have been a starting point for many writers in the genre. This is real though, a historical novel and if a slower read than some, gripping, epic and real.
Recommended.
This is a successful book in typical style, on a par with his 'Alaska' (which I preferred). It follows the pursuit of space flight from it beginnings, and builds its players from their roots upwards. Test pilots, senators, engineers, Committee executives, charlatans, wives, sons and daughters, some in several roles. It shows many of the steps needed to build up to space, and if perhaps not a techno thriller we are now familiar with it must have been a starting point for many writers in the genre. This is real though, a historical novel and if a slower read than some, gripping, epic and real.
Recommended.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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45 reviews
30 of 30 people found the following review helpful
"Space" Teaches and Entertains
4 Aug 2005
Format:Mass Market Paperback
James Michener's "Space" is a novel (historical fiction) on the scientific development of rocketry and space travel. He begins at the very beginning, with American and Russian interests trying to lure fleeing German V-2 scientists into their war/weaponry programs before the fall of Hitler's Germany. Michener then goes on to chart the developments in the budding space program, from the launch of the Russian satellite "Sputnik", to the space race, to the moon landing, the development of the space shuttle, and finally interplanetary travel to Mars.
Give Michener credit for being a prophet: He predicts the problems we are now facing with the heat tiles on the space shuttle, and he predicts the interplanetary interest in Mars.
Michener uses fictional characters based after the original 7 NASA astronauts. One character has a strong resemblance to John Glenn. These characters are the focus that the developing story revolves around. It is a good story, probably suited for the reader with an interest in space exploration, NASA, and space travel. I have read it twice and was engrossed both times, but then I love Michener. It seems there is no in-between opinion on Michener's writing style - you either like him or you don't. I happen to be in the former category and enjoy his lengthy and in-depth writing prose.
"Space" is a good read for those with an interest in space travel.
Jim "Konedog" Koenig
Give Michener credit for being a prophet: He predicts the problems we are now facing with the heat tiles on the space shuttle, and he predicts the interplanetary interest in Mars.
Michener uses fictional characters based after the original 7 NASA astronauts. One character has a strong resemblance to John Glenn. These characters are the focus that the developing story revolves around. It is a good story, probably suited for the reader with an interest in space exploration, NASA, and space travel. I have read it twice and was engrossed both times, but then I love Michener. It seems there is no in-between opinion on Michener's writing style - you either like him or you don't. I happen to be in the former category and enjoy his lengthy and in-depth writing prose.
"Space" is a good read for those with an interest in space travel.
Jim "Konedog" Koenig
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Fascinating Tapestry of Science and Society
27 Jan 2004
Format:Hardcover
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.
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Out of this World
24 Mar 2000
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Space is a tale that takes one from the battlefields of World War II to the Moon. Not many other books can make that claim, probably fewer still can do it with the finess that Michener can. As a sugar coated lesson in the history of rocketry I doubt that there is a better substitute. The final trip to the Moon as told by Michener is one of the most exciting sequences that I have ever read and well worth the wait. It is a little hard to get used to the imaginary state of Freemont- perhaps the story and characters involved were (to a point) renamed in order to protect the privacy of the real people they represented. Or maybe that is just what Michener wants us to think.
The con artist Professor who becomes a born again Christian is just hillarious. I really enjoyed the humor that he brings to the story. The reflection on America is a little embarrassing, but it is still funny.
The Space is a book that I was sorry to see end, with all of Michener's other loong novels I would have easily tolerated an extra hundered pages or so in this one.
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