Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (Science Matters) (Paperback)

by Paul Dickson (Author) "Listen now," said the NBC radio network announcer on the night of October 4, 1957, "for the sound that forevermore separates the old from the..." (more)
Key Phrases: actual satellite, scientific satellite, history office, United States, Soviet Union, Rocket Team (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Dickson (The Electronic Battlefield) chronicles in detail the Soviet satellite Sputnik. The Soviet Union was propelled into international prominence on October 4, 1957, by becoming the first nation to successfully launch a satellite, beating the American program by several months. The Soviet spacecraft panicked Americans, who constantly looked up into the sky, spoke in hushed tones and feared that the satellite presaged an atomic attack. President Eisenhower remained calm and tried to lead the country through the media-generated crisis, but the Sputnik "debacle" helped the Democrats in the next election. Dickson chronicles the history of rocket research, including Nazi successes during WWII. American and Soviet troops vied to seize German scientists and hardware. Dickson examines the feuding between the services for control of the space program and candidly exposes the reasons for the lag in American research. Eisenhower gets high marks for his quiet mastery of the situation, pleased that the Soviets were first into space, since that set off a race to improve American education, even as it fueled an outbreak of UFO hysteria. Dickson, whose bibliography runs to 19 pages, completely understands the lure and lore of Sputnik and has done a solid job of synthesizing prior books on the subject.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal
Space exploration is often portrayed as a U.S.-U.S.S.R. race, with the Soviet Union winning the initial lap by launching Sputnik, the earth's first artificial satellite. Yet as Dickson (The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary) reveals, for the United States, the race was also an internal competition, with the military (particularly Wernher von Braun's rocket team) and the Eisenhower administration grappling for control of the national space program. Eisenhower, who sought to demilitarize space and thereby open the skies to U.S. espionage satellites, eventually triumphed, establishing NASA as a civilian agency and successfully testing a clandestine satellite launch. Focusing on internal rivalries and including pre-Sputnik material, Dickson's book complements Robert A. Divine's The Sputnik Challenge (LJ 3/1/93), which considers the aftermath of Sputnik; James Killian's personal Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (LJ 1/15/78. o.p.); and the scholarly Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite (Harwood Academic, 2000; also issued as NASA Technical Memorandum 113448). For public and academic libraries. Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 310 pages
• Publisher: Berkley Trade (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425188434
• ISBN-13: 978-0425188439
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #891,657 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A good topic but questionable facts, November 1, 2002

By	mx5mike (Alexandria, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (Hardcover)

As a longtime space buff, I looked forward to reading this book about an event that happened before I was born. I found two factual errors that unfortunately left me questioning the authenticity of other facts in the book.

On page 41, the book reads "In 1968, as Apollo 11 lifted off for the Moon..." and on page 236 it states "When the space shuttle was first launched in 1982..." These events, of course, happened in 1969 and 1981, and rank among the most important space events ever (along with Sputnik's launch, certainly). How these two dates could be incorrect makes me just a little skeptical that other things I read in the book might just be a little off as well. What if a book on early US history listed Jefferson as the 4th President?

I really wanted to like this book, and altough it tended to be a little dry at times, I found many interesting stories and details, but two blatant factual inaccuracies that made it past however many people they made it past before the book's printing left me a little wary of the rest of the content. I don't want to malign the entirety of the author's work for what might be no more than typos, but I just could not get past those two.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sputnik is Still Flying, October 29, 2001

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (Hardcover)

On 4 October 1957, the world woke up in the space age. The first artificial satellite (people were originally calling it an artificial moon) had been successfully launched by the Soviet Union. It weighed less than 200 pounds and was only as big as a basketball, its batteries died after three weeks whereupon it went silent, and after three months aloft it disintegrated upon reentry into the atmosphere. This tiny and ephemeral ball made huge differences in science and the world political climate, and in Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (Walker & Co.), Paul Dickson has reviewed them all. He has also given a history of what led up to successful launches of satellites in both the Soviet Union and the US, so that his book is a useful review not just of the first satellite but of twentieth century space exploration in general.

The Russians already had a relatively long history of thinking about space before Sputnik went up. The visionary Tsiolovsky was a self-taught scholar who in 1898 created the first formula to specify what sort of power would be needed to send an object up so as not to fall down again. He described that this could be accomplished by a "reaction machine," which we know as a rocket. He never got to use models, but his first sketch of a spaceship had fuel tanks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, just as the shuttle uses. He described the use of booster rockets to attain escape velocity. Of course, Dickson tells the fascinating story of our own neglected rocket man, Robert Goddard, who made real rockets and gained over 200 patents, but mostly got only posthumous credit for his accomplishments. And then there was Sergei Korolev, a Red Army Colonel, who, as "chief designer" of the Soviet rocket program, was the man responsible for Sputnik, and for Gagarin's 1961 spaceflight. Little was known about him at the time, because the Soviets wanted their space efforts to be seen as a communal, rather than an individual, effort, and they thought that if he were known, he would be a target for CIA assassination. He had also been imprisoned in the Gulag when Stalin came to believe that rockets would be used to overthrow the government. Dickson reviews the worry with which Americans viewed Sputnik, and how Eisenhower (who was criticized for not worrying enough) actually was pleased that it opened up space for spy satellites.

American science and technology were in trouble in some ways. Dickson details the rivalry between the services to claim space as a theater of operations, and the rivalry between military and civilian agencies. There were problems of underfunding of basic research. Science within education needed higher priorities, and for many schools, the Sputnik era was the first time that Darwin could be mentioned. Sputnik resulted in a meaningful American space program, and Dickson's readable and informative re-evaluation of the repercussions of the little aluminum ball shows that it affects us still.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Technological marvel? World changing event? Both?, September 14, 2004

By	Eric Hobart (Gastonia, NC United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (Hardcover)

Paul Dickson argues in his book "Sputnik: The shock of the Century" that this little 184 pound satellite launched by the Soviets in October 1957 changed the world. He says that it changed the way Americans thought, and that it paved the way for our own space program.

I agree that it was a shocking event and quite a blow to the pride of the United States - to see the Soviets launch an artificial Earth orbiting satellite before we could do it? Unheard of! I don't think that it changed the world quite as much as Dickson claims, however.

At the close of his book, Dickson says that the two most important marvels of the 20th century were Sputnik and the Internet. Certainly leaves a lot of room for discussion, doesn't it?

I believe that Dickson has done us quite a service by writing this book - it is a great history both of the space race up to, and including, an introduction to both the Apollo and Gemini missions of the 1960's, as well as the social history that acompanied this massive PR coup by the Soviets.

I especially enjoyed the way that Dickson explained how much America focused on education (science, math, and the like) after the Soviets beat us into space. I also tremendously enjoyed the role of Werner Von Braun in our own efforts to launch a satellite. However, I think that this book easily could have been much, much larger in order to adequately cover the primary topic - Sputnik and all of the ramifications of that fateful day in October.