欧宝娱乐

I have a growing collection of books about the Apollo program. Apollo, The Race To The Moon, by Murray and Cox, is very much unlike the others. It focuses on the cast of thousands who brought the program to life, instead of on the more famously well-known astronauts. Names like Armstrong, Aldrin and Lovell barely make cameo appearances, while others like Kranz and Kraft run throughout the book. Getting to know them and watching them do something they truly loved is the point here. Not so much getting to the moon, but their commitment to doing it.

There are a few names here that will be familiar to you if you grew up in the Space Age: Werner von Braun is probably the one nearly anyone would remember. But even though I was one of those astronaut wanna-bes who took for granted that I鈥檇 land a job some day as a rocket pilot, or at least a moon bus driver, there were quite a few names I hadn鈥檛 known before that were staggeringly significant to the space program. How could I have ever considered myself a science geek and not known and loved engineers with names like Rocco Petrone and Mad Don Arabian? I hang my head in shame to think of it.

Murray and Cox spent three years interviewing them, and put together this refreshingly personal history, instead of the geek-o-rama you often get when you crack open a book about the space program. Not that this wasn鈥檛 a long pleasure cruise on the Empress Of The Nerds. Reading about engineers building the biggest rocket ever and shooting it into space was a geek trip that took me back to my younger days, when I looked up to these professional ubernerds as heroes worthy of worship.

My only disappointment was that, after interviewing more than 150 people over a period of three years, all Murry and Cox could write was one slim volume, when they could have easily gone on and on until it was a boxed set big enough to make Stephen King鈥檚 gape in awe. If only I could run across that on the used book shelves at Saint Vinnie鈥檚.