Share <Embed>

Buy New

$11.95

List Price: $50.00
Save: $38.05 (76%)

$11.95 + $27.95 shipping

Only 2 left in stock - order soon.

Ships from and sold by Poverty Hill Books.

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

This item ships to France.

Select delivery location

Buy Used

$4.99

+ $0.00 shipping

Select delivery location

Used: Very Good | Details

Sold by super-fly-books

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Added to

Unable to add item to List. Please try again.

Other Sellers on Amazon

Add to Cart

$25.95
+ $16.95 shipping

Sold by: fortbc

Add to Cart

$45.00
& FREE Shipping on eligible orders. Details

Sold by: Amazon.com

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 2 images

Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest Paperback – November 1, 2006

by Gerard Degroot (Author)

19 customer reviews

See all 6 formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$11.59

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

—

$122.67

$2.95

Paperback

"Please retry"

$11.95

$11.30

$3.00

A selection of the History, Scientific American, and Quality Paperback Book Clubs

For a very brief moment during the 1960s, America was moonstruck. Boys dreamt of being an astronaut; girls dreamed of marrying one. Americans drank Tang, bought “space pens” that wrote upside down, wore clothes made of space age Mylar, and took imaginary rockets to the moon from theme parks scattered around the country.

But despite the best efforts of a generation of scientists, the almost foolhardy heroics of the astronauts, and 35 billion dollars, the moon turned out to be a place of “magnificent desolation,” to use Buzz Aldrin’s words: a sterile rock of no purpose to anyone. In Dark Side of the Moon, Gerard J. DeGroot reveals how NASA cashed in on the Americans’ thirst for heroes in an age of discontent and became obsessed with putting men in space. The moon mission was sold as a race which America could not afford to lose. Landing on the moon, it was argued, would be good for the economy, for politics, and for the soul. It could even win the Cold War. The great tragedy is that so much effort and expense was devoted to a small step that did virtually nothing for mankind.

Drawing on meticulous archival research, DeGroot cuts through the myths constructed by the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations and sustained by NASA ever since. He finds a gang of cynics, demagogues, scheming politicians, and corporations who amassed enormous power and profits by exploiting the fear of what the Russians might do in space.

Exposing the truth behind one of the most revered fictions of American history, Dark Side of the Moon explains why the American space program has been caught in a state of purposeless wandering ever since Neil Armstrong descended from Apollo 11 and stepped onto the moon. The effort devoted to the space program was indeed magnificent and its cultural impact was profound, but the purpose of the program was as desolate and dry as lunar dust.

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Lily Koppel

1,162

Paperback
$5.83
Gerard J. DeGroot

15

Hardcover
35 offers from $5.19

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When President Kennedy announced that the United States would land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, he forced NASA to assume a "faster, cheaper, better" mindset that continues to bedevil it today, says DeGroot (The Bomb: A History). The space agency quickly came up against the budgetary pressures of the Vietnam War and expanding domestic programs, but as DeGroot writes, Lyndon Johnson insisted the U.S. would meet his predecessor's goal, even as NASA's budget was cut every year. DeGroot reveals that engineers turned a blind eye on slipshod components in order to meet impossible deadlines. NASA's public relations machine portrayed its astronauts as wholesome all-Americans even as many of them behaved like rutting frat boys when off duty. The claim has often been made that consumers benefited from the space program, but the author points out that Tang, Velcro and Teflon were invented long before Sputnik was launched. DeGroot writes with 20-20 hindsight, and his sarcasm may put off some readers, although it makes for entertaining reading. Anyone interested in a corrective view to the official hagiographies of the space program will find this acid-etched history hard to put down. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

If asked to name the greatest technological achievement of the twentieth century, many people would say the 1969 Apollo moon landing. They would be surprised to discover that this superlative achievement had a dark side. How many of us knew that the U.S. government took its initial rocket technology directly from Nazi Germany and absorbed their leading scientists for the purpose of "security"? Perhaps not many, which is why historian Degroot should be commended for shining a light on the lunar quest. Citing American competitiveness, Degroot argues that the moon landing was primarily a stunt of one-upmanship: the Russians getting into space first with Sputnik had a profound affect on Americans, as politicians and citizens alike became obsessed with beating them to the moon. Never mind the "obscenely huge" cost of a lunar mission and consequent risk to defense, or that sending a man into space was perhaps negligible in terms of science. At the present time, when NASA has scheduled another moon shot for 2018, Degroot revisits the question that should have been fully explored the last time around: Why? Jerry Eberle
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product details

Paperback: 321 pages
Publisher: NYU Press; First Edition edition (November 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0814719953
ISBN-13: 978-0814719954
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 19 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,185,991 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1709 in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Engineering > Aerospace > Astronautics & Space Flight
- #2872 in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Engineering > Reference > History
- #3845 in Books > Science & Math > Astronomy & Space Science > Aeronautics & Astronautics

Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

Be the first video

Your name here

Customer reviews

Write a customer review

See all 19 customer reviews

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

A dishonest attack on humankind's greatest adventure

June 4, 2014

To those who lived through the space race of the 1960s, the 1969 landing on the moon seemed at the time to be the culmination of human striving, the greatest accomplishment of mankind up to that point. It was a moment during which the entire planet came together, and an event that seemed to suggest the limitless potential of humankind. It was also the moment when the West- and the democratic, free government it symbolized- had wrested the symbolic leadership of the world away from the totalitarian Soviet Union. It was a moment that made you feel proud to be human, and to be alive.

Gerard DeGroot is having none of this, however. To him, the entire space program of both nations was one huge waste that accomplished nothing, wasted resources, and stood as a monument to folly. In this he appears to be mostly alone, but then one expects history professors to advance unique theories in the pursuit of publication. The problem is that DeGroot's book does not really support his thesis. He cites scores of facts that are contrary to it, in fact, like how the space program gave us weather satellites that revolutionized forecasting, satellites that brought us instantaneous worldwide communications, and navigational satellites that allow us to pinpoint our positions on Earth (and in space) to within a few feet. Every piece of research that did not make it to a spacecraft is deemed to be "wasted"- the author is obviously not very familiar with how science and technology advances. Only in the Social Sciences do researchers proceed directly to the truth without making any false steps! The only real support for DeGroot's thesis comes from his own comments, which consist primarily of snide qualifiers that seem to follow the discussion of every accomplishment.

DeGroot's argument eventually comes down to a zero-sum game: The money was wasted because people were suffering in the world, and the money could have been spent on them. The problem with that argument is that's it's an argument against everything. The NASA's budget reached a high of 1% of the Federal budget in 1965. The same year, we spent 60 times as much on defense, three times as much on Federal education programs and bureaucracy, six times as much on welfare... you get the picture. To single out 1% of the federal budget (which shrank to 0.58% by the time Apollo wrapped up) is disingenuous at best. Worse, DeGroot is, in places, dishonest. As another reviewer points out, he actually misquotes Eisenhower, by omitting the context of a quote, to make it seem as if Eisenhower is attacking the space program when he's actually referring to war. He sets up straw men, like pointing out that the decline of the space program has not "led to cultural bankruptcy"- as if anyone has ever made that argument. These is nothing new in the history that DeGroot tells, and there are a great many better and more accurate books on everything from the politics of the space race to the technical details of the rockets that carried men to the moon.

3 people found this helpful4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Joseph Davis

A rancid polemic with a deceptive title

August 1, 2009

This book has been sitting on one of my shelves for a couple of years now. I bought it because its title and the brief advertising blurb I read at the time seemed to promise an objective, non-romantic but fair, retrospective of the conquest of the moon. In honour of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing I took the book off the shelf and started reading it, beginning with the author's preface. What a disappointment. This book is anything but objective. DeGroot has a very clear agenda. "Putting men in space was an immensely expensive distraction of little scientific or cultural worth. The American people, in other words, were fleeced" That's it. End of story. DeGroot has spoken. He doesn't debate the pros and cons of putting man in space; he just declares it to be an expensive mistake. So what kind of book can we expect to follow from this kind of hidebound, obtuse start? I decided to check some Amazon.Com reviews and learned that Mr. DeGroot, who calls himself a Professor of Modern History, has made some astonishingly blockheaded blunders. I won't discuss these errors, since other reviewers have already done such a good job of this, but I will say that if you want to write a sneering, iconoclastic book about the greatest technological achievement of the 20th Century you had better get your facts straight. I am going to pitch this shallow, derivative, juvenile piece of pulp. Instead, I've started reading Iosif Shklovsky's 'Five Billion Vodka Bottles to The Moon'. Highly recommended.

3 people found this helpful4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Ryan P. Ver Berkmoes

Sloppy and error-filled

July 11, 2017

There are significant factual errors throughout the book. These alone caused me to question its value and conclusions. Given that the author is unable to get even the most basic details correct (Apollo 9 did not go to the moon, etc etc etc), there is no reason for me to believe that any of the supporting evidence he offers is presented honestly or competently. If you are going to offer up a contrarian view, at least make it credible.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

LEM

Garbage

September 10, 2011

I came across this book when I decided to google my father just yesterday. I only read one page. Page 214 Interview with Mel Friedman Quality Control. Mel Friedman is my father. I would love to know where Mr De Groot got this so called interview with my father. My father only did one interview with one person. My father did not tell me the man's name but the interviewer told my father he was opening up a museum and wanted my father to "donate" all his NASA memorabilia from working on all the Apollo projects but my father refused. This interview was years ago way before this book was written. Was this Mr De Groot that tried to get my father to give up all his NASA memorabilia? I believe this so called interview with my father is complete propaganda. My father never would have said the things Mr De Groot said he did. I have written an email to Mr De Groot as to his source of this so called interview with my father. I await his reply. My father would take to me to work at Grumman. I was physically in a LEM. My father was also in several meetings with Astronauts. I have met a few of them. I even have some of their autographs on NASA memorabilia. I would not recommend this book to anyone.

5 people found this helpful6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Pages with related products. See and discover other items: apollo program

Buy New

$11.95

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Buy Used

$4.99

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Other Sellers on Amazon

Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest Paperback – November 1, 2006

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From Booklist

Product details

Related Video Shorts (0)

Be the first video

Customer reviews

Read reviews that mention

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Most recent customer reviews

Buy New $11.95

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Buy Used $4.99

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Sorry, there was a problem.

Sorry, there was a problem.

Other Sellers on Amazon

Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest Paperback – November 1, 2006

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From Booklist

Product details

Related Video Shorts (0)

Be the first video

Customer reviews

Read reviews that mention

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Most recent customer reviews

Buy New

$11.95

Buy Used

$4.99