Customer Reviews

The Race

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

On the back cover of this book is a photograph of the author, James Schefter. Arms crossed over his chest, wearing dark sunglasses, he stares at the photographer in what is apparently intended to be a macho pose. He is wearing a dark polo shirt with the NASA "Meatball" emblem patch over the left breast. This is rather odd. James Schefter is a journalist. Why is he dressed like a tough-guy astronaut? What is even stranger is that below the NASA patch is embroidered the name of this book, "The Race." What kind of author goes out and has the name of his book embroidered on a shirt, especially before that book has been printed?

The Race is a deeply-flawed, error-filled book that adds nothing to our understanding of the space race. Schefter was a journalist with both Time and Life magazines during the 1960s. As such, he got to hang around with some of the astronauts and other NASA officials. He bills this book as the "uncensored" account of that epic undertaking. But by this mostly what he means is that it includes some stories of astronauts getting drunk and cheating on their wives. Many of these more ribald tales are not totally believable. Some of them don't seem physically possible. One story is that sometimes 3 or 4 women would line up in the hallway outside an astronaut's hotel room, waiting for their "turn" with him. This stud service tale and many others have the air of stories told around a poker table over too many beers--about as believable as the story about the fish that got away. While the astronauts were not saints, as Tom Wolfe proved two decades ago (in what remains the best astronaut book ever written), Schefter's stories don't ring true.

Schefter exhibits many of the flaws of a journalist trying to write history. In short, he does not let facts get in the way of a good story. The book is riddled with numerous errors, many of which are relatively minor, but all of which indicate that Schefter is a sloppy and lazy writer.

For instance, the Vanguard satellite did not have "primitive photo-cells" that took an image of the earth. The Saturn I did not have a single F-1 engine and the F-1 engine produced 1.5, not 1.3 million pounds of thrust. "Escape velocity" is not 17,500 miles per hour. And the X-15 rocket plane was not dropped from the belly of a B-29; it was dropped from the wing of a B-52. He was obviously thinking of the movie The Right Stuff and its depiction of the X-1. You have to wonder about an author who seems to take his cues from movie versions of events.

One of his bigger errors concerns his account of the July 1969 explosion of the Soviet N-1 moon rocket. Schefter says that American spy satellites photographed the rocket on the pad just before the launch. Not true. More importantly, he says that when it exploded, it killed 100 people. Also not true. Nobody died. He is obviously confusing the explosion with the 1960 explosion of a Soviet ballistic missile that killed well over 100 people.

All of these things are totally checkable. The fact that Schefter did not bother to check them indicates an extreme laziness and journalistic arrogance on his part. The lack of footnotes, bibliography, or other sources indicates that we simply have to take Schefter's word for all this stuff. That is hard to do considering all the obvious mistakes.

If we cannot trust him on the things that we can check, how are we to trust him about the things that we cannot check? He has all kinds of rude astronaut stories which apparently came from the Houston NASA public affairs officer, Paul Haney (although Schefter does not make clear what are first-hand accounts and what are hearsay). As I already noted, many of these do not seem believable. Others are deeply problematic.

A good example is Schefter's account of an incident following the death of astronaut Ted Freeman in 1964. Schefter was a young reporter who heard about the crash of Freeman's plane and was told by his editor to meet chief astronaut Deke Slayton at the home of Freeman's wife. He went over there and saw what he thought was Slayton's Corvette parked in the driveway. He went to the door and knocked. Freeman's wife answered and Schefter stammered out that he had heard about the accident. An angry neighbor then told Schefter to get lost.

Schefter claims that it turns out that the Corvette actually belonged to the astronauts' doctor and that Deke Slayton was not there because he had stopped at a local bar first before facing the widow. The whole story smells. For one thing, the astronauts' doctor did not own a Corvette. And Schefter's claim that Slayton went to have a beer before meeting the widow of one of his men, whether true or not (and how are we to know?), seems like a slap at Slayton.

In Schefter's favor, it seems likely that Freeman's widow already knew that something was wrong when the doctor and neighbor showed up at her door. It is unlikely that Schefter is the one who blurted out the fact that her husband was dead. But the very fact that a reporter showed up to see the widow only an hour after the death of her husband is disgusting. Why should we have any sympathy for this vulture?

The subtitle of this book also says that it is the "complete" account of the race to the moon. It isn't by a long shot. There is very little information on the Soviet side of that race. The Russians barely exist in his narrative. Is the subtitle merely another factual error or an "embellishment?"

This is a pathetic attempt at a gossipy memoir by a guy who has trouble getting his facts right. Avoid it.

As a once-over lightly guide to the Mercury / Gemini / Apollo programme and its Russian counterparts, this isn't a bad book. But there are better ones available. Chaiken's "A Man on the Moon" is more interesting. Heppenheimer's "Countdown" seems more thorough. And James Harford's "Korolev" covers the Soviet effort in far greater depth.

Finding a way to make "The Race" stand out from the competition in an increasingly crowded publishing niche must have been tough. As a journalist in the thick of it as it happened, Schefter chose the "uncensored" route. "Uncensored", of course, is a meaningless adjective in this respect. As far as I know, there is no Censor of Books About Space. In its tabloid sense, however, a tag of uncensored makes us expect scandal and revelation. Sure enough, Schefter offers a little of both. But it's largely irrelevant. We knew 6/7ths of the Mercury astronauts were less than faithful - that is, we did if we read Wolfe's "Right Stuff" or ever personally knew a military pilot. And to read about some astronaut or other leaving his (to be famous) footprints on the roof lining of someone's car really adds very little to the narrative.

If Schefter was looking for an angle, why not his own? I would love to know what it was really like to be involved in reporting the space programme in the 1960s. Did he get caught up in the excitement of it all? Did he cry when Apollo 1 burned? The book sledom ventures into first person, which is a shame, because when it does it becomes novel and interesting. A little more humanity, a little more involvement, and this could have gone from being an OK book to one worth keeping.

This book was a disappointment, and very misleading. I have read many books on the space race and program, notably, "The Right Stuff", "Countdown", the outstanding "A Man on the Moon", "Lost Moon", etc. When buying this, I thought that I would be getting an insider's view of the U.S Manned Space Program and the Space Race in general. What it is instead, is a re-hash of the story that any reader with a casual interest in space history would already know. The Germans invent the V-2, there are "our Germans and their Germans" (See the move the Right Stuff, 1983 for that phraseology), the Russians initially take the lead in space, we go through Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, finally landing on the moon. There is no insider view here. The author doesn't even tell the story in the first person. Aside from some amusing anecdotes about the astronauts sexual prowess (which has all been told before)and Ham and Sam, there is nothing even remotely new or uncensored in this book. It is a good primer for the reader interested in the history of the space program, but the publisher and author ought to excuse themselves for the misleading title

No matter how good a book is, finding inaccuracies in nonfiction can ruin the read.

It's surprising that Schefter, who, as we're frequently reminded, was there, would get some simple, basic facts wrong. For example, he at first accurately describes Deke Stayton's heart condition as arrhythmia, but then goes on to refer to it as a murmur. Heart arrhythmia and heart murmurs are two very different things. Later he describes how the U.S. sent Chimpanzees into space, but then refers to them as Rhesus monkeys. Clearly, a Chimpanzee and a Rhesus Monkey are not the same animal. A final example is when he talks about the X-15 being dropped from the belly of a B-29. X-15s were launched from under the wing of a B-52. Perhaps he was thinking of the X-1 which was dropped from a B-52.

The sad part is that people who are just getting interested in this topic and who are reading this book as an early introduction of the subject will be confused by information that is not completely accurate. I found myself scrutinizing everything I read wondering if it was all true. The lack of detailed information on the Russia's big moon-intended rocket was a surprise as well. It's a shame this book wasn't edited more closely. It could have been much better. C+

Simply put, the book is a good, easy read about the history of the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program. However, Schefter speaks more in detail about the rocket program (with von Braun), the Mercury and Gemini flights than he does about the Apollo program. The book is approximately 300 pages and only around page 210 does he start to discuss the Apollo tests and flights. In that respect, I'm disappointed that there wasn't more in-depth information about Apollo. I felt that he quickly skimmed over Apollo 8 - 10 and quickly concluded with Apollo 11. Nevertheless, the book is full of good information and is definitely worth a read. The book is as good as the other books on space that I've read (For All Mankind; Flight; Andrew Chaikin's book). Recommended.

The Race is written by James Schefter who (after reading the introduction) was one of the frontline reporters of NASA's manned spaceflight program from the mid 1960's. Given that information I assumed that I would learn a lot about what happened behind the scenes in Gemini-Apollo era, rather than the history text book story. And it certainly starts off that way. A great deal of detail goes into the pre-NASA days, the rise of Werner Von Braun, Bob Gilruth and the soviet Chief Designer. A few interesting stories such as the time Neil Armstrong slept in for the first X-15 flight and the tension between Chris Kraft and Scott Carpenter fill in some of the gaps, but I'm left feeling that given the author, a lot more could have been said. This book isn't in the same league as Andrew Chaikin's 'A Man on the Moon'. Only for the dedicated space cadet!

The reader from Philadelphia is both right and wrong. When Deke Slayton's heart problem (or non-problem) was discovered, NASA doctors referred to it interchangeably as arrhythmia and a murmur. Those terms in 1999 have taken on separate meanings. Slayton himself used both terms to describe the condition, often accompanied by colorful descriptors of the medical community.

Rhesus monkeys (Sam and Miss Sam) flew on two Little Joe high-altitude tests launched from Wallops Island as described. The chimps Ham and Enos flew on missions launched from Cape Canaveral and were clearly identified as chimpanzees in the text. NASA people then and now refer to all four of the flights under the generic rubric of "monkey flights."

The X-15 was dropped from a B-52, not a B-29. This was corrected in the book's second printing.

There remains today significant questions about whether or not the big Russian rocket was for a moon program or for a space station program. I believe it was for the latter. No cosmonaut to my knowledge has ever come forward to describe his training for a moon mission. Nor have the Russian engineers involved in their space program made such claims, beyond saying that prototype "models" of lunar spacecraft were fabricated.

-- Jim Schefter, October 6, 1999

Thirty years ago I was sitting in a Wayne State University classroom when America's first manned sub-orbital flight took place. Didn't much care about it then. Now comes a book by a reporter who was there in the middle of it, and I'm looking at all that drama I missed.

Schefter splendidly raises the curtain on the savage contest between them and us. It's a fascinating expose of how a secretive Soviet rocketman succeeded in acing our superior technology. The Race to conquer space was on.

This is a terrific tale. It is amazing from this historical perspective to read how the Soviets succeeded more in pulling the wool over the world's eyes and making their space feats seem much better than they were.

At the same, Schefter tells the hidden stories behind the American space program. Thirty years is a long time. It was worth the wait for this book. My guess is this will be one of the books the serious historians writing fifty years in the future will use as a source document. No question: this is an A+ read.

This is a rather pompous title for such a slender volume, but it does the job. Schefter covered the space program for many years for Time-Life and has a small claim to fame, or at least notoriety, as a result: it's mentioned in numerous other histories that NASA had to establish a procedure to handle telling the family when an astronaut died because in one case the wife found out from a reporter. Well, Schefter was that reporter.

He uses his experience and perspective well, providing new insight in this personal and anecdotal account of the space program. There's less of the science and technology here but much more of the individual astronauts and key personnel, particularly Bob Gilruth and Chris Kraft.

For completists like me the book is interesting but lightweight, going into some of the technical detail but not as much as I would like. However, there's still new information here (such as the revelation above), so I found it entertaining. Overall, though, this is probably a better book for people with a more casual interest in the space program. In fact, I would enthusiastically recommend it for them, with a more moderate but still positive recommendation for space nuts like myself.

For me, the high point of this book was not the triumpjant finish to the space race that dominated my childhood, nor even the re-telling of so many of those heroic feats as America boldly went where none had gone before.

Stirring stuff, to be sure, and I never tire of reading a new version, but it's the human touches that bring the story to life and James Schefter has included a great many personal anecdotes that help put the reader in the padded couches of the astronauts.

The side-splitting account of a simulation of the Gemini V mission where one of the astronauts got seriously ill had me in stitches. The flight controllers must have been tearing their hair out as the atmosphere quickly deteriorated into a brown haze and there were no good splashdown sites available.

There are other funny stories, and yes the tale of Enos the chimp was also a good one. But there are also moments of tragedy, as astronauts and cosmonauts died along the way.

Another view is that of the astronauts' wives, who had a great deal to put up with - housewife one day, media celebrity the next. And by extension all the hundreds of thousands of workers who devoted their lives to Apollo, and left the wife at home, maybe sharing a Saturday night together. A whole generation of engineers missed out on family life.

I've read many of these books, and it seems to me that the best of them are coming out now, long after it matters about politics and reputations and hiding the shortcomings and failures. I note the technical errors, but this is a book by a reporter, who had other things to do at the time, other stories to tell. It's not an engineer's book, nor an astronaut's book, it's the book of someone who was close to the program, but made a living from words rather than machines or missions.

And the atmosphere is what counts in this book - you get a sense of what made these people tick.

A lot of anecdotes I hadn't heard before makes it good value to begin with, but if I had to recommend a book to get the feel of the space race to those children of latter days who didn't grow up with it, this would be it.