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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Constellation Confusion,
By
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This review is from: Starfall (Hardcover)
A hard-to-come-by collector's item, this work's legacy is not literary style. Stitched together like a cheap baseball, the book is co-authored [and I blush to use the term] by Mrs. Grissom and Henry Still, a newspaperman turned aerospace executive. Collaborations work successfully when each partner brings out the best of the other; when they fail, the literary result is akin to fingernails on a blackboard. In this work the authors are almost at cross-purposes. Still, in many respects, is the gung-ho space reporter who uses the work as his opportunity to get a space history on the record. Even allowing for age, this is a shoddy history of the space program. Still allots a single paragraph for the entire Apollo 8 mission and runs far afield from the personal doings of the Grissoms, not one of whom ever created ball bearings in Skylab, although that mechanical feat merits mention in the author's opinion. Only God knows why.And what of Mrs. Grissom? "The tragic and heroic story of her husband and family caught up in America's race for the moon," as the cover proclaims, is told unevenly and superficially. I expected to encounter spleen from the wife of one of the space program's more perplexing, misunderstood, and maligned characters, and I would have said more power to her. Watch "The Right Stuff:" the Betty Grissom actress, with tears and rage, has it down pat as she screams "Are these the goodies? The military owes you, Gus, but they owe me, too." The real Mrs. Grissom, when she can extricate herself from her collaborator's self-aggrandizement, tells a blunted tale of marriage to a man whose mistress is indeed the military and the hard drinking jocular goodies of the test pilot world. Perhaps no insight is more telling than her remark that she missed Gus's phone calls after the fire because, in essence, that was the sum and substance of their marriage. Her chief regret, it would seem, is that her boys had little of their father in his lifetime, and none after the fire. The inner rage does make a brief appearance well after the Apollo fire. In 1971 Al Shepard and Pete Conrad tell her rather pointedly that as a widow she is no longer in the astronaut club, in that her money from the Life Magazine astronaut contract would be redirected to the living astronaut pool. Reasonably and profoundly affronted, she learned through a quirk of fate of two hungry young personal injury lawyers working out of a tiny office in a Seven-Eleven complex. And thus began a Quixotic $10,000,000 damage suit against North American Rockwell that covered three states in a frantic effort to outpace statute of limitations problems. The suit brought considerable national consternation toward Mrs. Grissom who was perceived as suing the country and the military rather than a private manufacturer of space hardware. [The other two widows, for reasons unexplained, declined to join her in the action] Hampered by lack of funds and the hard reality that astronaut Grissom himself had participated in preparation of his ship at Rockwell, the lawyers were happy to settle for $350,000: after expenses, each attorney pocketed $75,000. Betty Grissom received $60,000. Another shameful legacy of the fire. The one redeeming element of this work is the hint of rich raw material. The film "The Right Stuff" draws substantially from scenes in the book, though it inflates them with steroids. The time is ripe for a scholarly and literary masterpiece on Gus Grissom, the second American in space and certainly the most star-crossed of the American astronauts. If Liberty Bell 7
9 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A shocking revelation,
This review is from: Starfall (Hardcover)
Betty Grissom was furious when an official from North American Rockwell (the company that built the Apollo Command Module) suggested that her husband Gus may have been responsible for starting the fatal Apollo 1 fire by inadvertently kicking a bundle of wires beneath his couch. She felt - and I think justifiably - that the momory of her husband was being sullied.But what of the memories of Gus' Apollo 1 crew mates, Edward White and Roger Chaffee? Betty makes a shocking revelation about those two. Gus was "so mad" with them because he couldn't get them to work! They were too busy wheeling and dealing with their business investments and playing to have any time left over to devote to Apollo! Chaffee was, and will always remain, an unknown commodity as he died before he had the chance to prove himself on a space flight. However as the first American to walk in space Ed White's reputation was made. What I find absolutly incredible is the admission that Gus had lost control of his own crew. He had only two men as his subordinates, one of which was an American hero, and that was more then poor old Gus could handle! Deke Slayton wrote in his autobiography that had Gus lived he and not Neil Armstrong would have been the first man to walk on the moon. But if Gus was unable to command respect from Ed White what would have happened when he found himself with Buzz Aldrin as his Lunar Module Pilot?
3 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Starfall,
By Robert Barton (Beaverton, OR USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Starfall (Hardcover)
A very sad story about how Americas race to the Moon destroyed a family.
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