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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Shock, Fear, Challenge, Mistakes and Successes!, 3 Jul 2004
I was very impressed with this book because it captured the popular reaction to the event at the time, detailed the decisions that led up to the U.S. falling behind, and spells out what happened later (for good and bad). Although over 90 percent of what is in the book was known to me before, I found it helpful to see the pieces all put together in one place. As a result, I feel a sense of closure over Sputnik now for the first time in my life.Indirectly, I also got a new appreciation for the character of American Society. While reading the book, I compared the reactions here to how the U.S. handled the Gulf War and the terrorist bombings this year with the many mistakes of the Vietnam era. Like all people, we make our share of mistakes, usually when we are feeling overconfident. But we don't like making mistakes, and we then do whatever it takes to do better the next time by not repeating the old errors. For us, once is enough. For those who are old enough to have teenage or adult children, I would recommend that you share this book with them. I do not recall a better book for capturing the mood of the late 1950s and early 1960s in terms of what we were thinking about in the Cold War. This book can help create a link between generations. I'm sure that many young people do not know that many of today's technologies, such as packet switching for the Internet, came as byproducts of the Cold War competition. This book can also help create a connection from the present into the past through observations such as that one. One continuing lesson of this book is that we still have probably not done the right job of defining our American and worldwide objectives for space. Although we got to the moon in 1969, we couldn't easily get back there again now. Our vision of space needs to be a continuous, contiguous one that expands our knowledge and capabilities |
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