space by james michener book review

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by James A. Michener ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 12, 1982

America's space program, from WW II roots to the 1980s, is the subject of Michener's new mega-faction—so those readers who relished the dynasty/historical-romance aspects of his multi-century epics (Chesapeake, The Covenant, etc.) are likely to be disappointed by the smaller scope and quieter action here. Others, however, may appreciate the close-up focus—the same handful of central characters for 640 pp.—or the relatively in-depth treatment of the science/issues involved. And those put off by Tom Wolfe's jivey, semi-hostile approach in The Right Stuff will certainly prefer Michener's more positive (though not uncritical) view of the astronaut program. In 1944 US engineer Stanley Mott is the man responsible for locating and secretly rescuing Germany's top rocket scientists: the real-life von Braun (a background figure here) as well as the fictional Dieter Kolff, who manages to sneak out of Germany with formulas for long-range rocketry. So Mott, with wife Rachel, oversees the research program once the Germans are resettled in Alabama. And, meanwhile, we also meet future astronaut John Pope, a brainy, "straight arrow" Navy test pilot (with raunchy Korea buddy, Marine Randy Claggett) whose lawyer-wife Penny is a vital aide to stolid Sen. Norman Grant, a WW II hero on the Senate's space committee. In the early '50s, however, Mott is removed from the program (he switches to the embryonic NASA, studies celestial mechanics and ablation); the three major military branches feud about space-program control; and Ike's Defense Secretary virtually calls off all rocketry plans. Then . . . Sputnik—and everything changes. Ike revises his tune. After debate, space-program control is given to NASA. Mott and Kolff violently argue about goals and methods. (Manned vs. unmanned flights? Flashy moon-shots vs. wide exploration? Earth-orbit rendezvous vs. lunar?) And John and Randy are in one of the first astronaut batches: their Gemini mission, with flight-walks, is detailed; career-woman Penny is harassed for not conforming to the chosen astronaut PR-style; the raunchy goings-on at Cocoa Beach are touched on (a beautiful muckraking Korean journalist sleeps around); and, on a fictional Apollo 18 mission to the moon's "dark side," Randy and another pilot die from sun radiation. In an apparent attempt to provide relief from the dense, unvaried material here, Michener supplies a few limp subplots—e.g., Mott's worry over his sons (one homosexual, one drug-dealer). And one subplot—the doings of a con-man UFO guru who switches to anti-Darwinism in the '80s—becomes increasingly important, with a wind-up debate on Faith vs. Science. Finally, however, this is Michener's customary education-in-an-epic package: less romantic/exotic than usual, typically stiff in dialogue and narration, inferior to many non-fiction sources of popularized astro-science—yet sure to draw a vast Big-Book readership.

Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1982

ISBN: 0449203794

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1982

THRILLER | TECHNICAL & MEDICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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by James A. Michener

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New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

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BOOK TO SCREEN

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection , 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

More by Kathy Reichs

by Kathy Reichs

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A NOVEL OF VERY HIGH ADVENTURE

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By John Noble Wilford

• Sept. 19, 1982

SPACE By James A. Michener. 622 pp. New York: Random House. $17.95.

JAMES A. MICHENER has attempted to tell the story of the American space program through fiction, but not all that successfully. The problem may be inherent in the story: It is too contemporary, the real people and events still too familiar, to lend itself to historical novelization in the manner of Mr. Michener's more notable recent books, ''Chesapeake'' and ''Centennial.'' Great sagas have a mythic quality, and myth takes time to evolve.

The time that Mr. Michener writes of begins properly in the closing months of World War II. Rocket technology was being put to its first ambitious test by the Germans at Peenemunde. The seeds of the cold war that would dictate the pace and character of early space flight were germinating. And most of the actors of the drama, the pilots and engineers and politicians, were finding their vocations.

The author has, as usual, done his research well. He has also managed to develop through his sprawling narrative all of the major political, social and technological themes that resonated during the years of the first exploration of space. Thus, if ''Space'' becomes a best seller, as may be expected on the basis of his past record, a wide audience will be exposed to a sympathetic, historically sound treatment of an important human endeavor that some day could be the stuff of myth or at least of grand chronicles in the tradition of Hakluyt.

But the weakness of the fictional approach shows up early in the book. The German rocket team's flight into Bavaria and surrender to the American Army is told here with gripping effect because Mr. Michener offers a generally faithful rendition of what actually happened. Even so, how much better it would have been to relive the action through Wernher von Braun, one of the truly imposing figures of space exploration, rather than through the fictional associate of von Braun, Dieter Kolff, as interesting as he is at times. It is also rather curious that Mr. Michener went to such length, through vivid scenes of naval combat in the Pacific, to build a fictional officer, Norman Grant, into a hero, only to diminish him so thoroughly later as the epitome of Congressional weakness and shortsightedness; how much better to have had more of Lyndon Johnson, one of the true architects of the American space program. The closer the book approaches nonfiction, the more effective and convincing it generally is.

Many of the real people of the space program do make appearances where appropriate, but the story is told through a dozen or so fictional characters, including Mr. Michener's own team of astronauts, the Solid Six. Although John Pope, earnest and straightarrow in the John Glenn mold, is supposed to be the central figure, the most realistic characterization is of Randy Claggett, a hotshot test pilot and good ol' boy whose first name says a lot about his appetite. Mr. Michener captures much of the on-the-ground flavor of flight training at Patuxent and at Cape Canaveral and of the hucksterism in creating the astronauts' Boy Scout image. But Tom Wolfe did this better in ''The Right Stuff.''

Surprisingly little of ''Space'' is devoted to space flight itself. The author does invent two missions, Gemini 13 and Apollo 18, and it is with the latter flight, to the ''dark side'' of the moon, that the book finally conveys the technical complexity, risk and adventure of travel to outer space.

ONE of Mr. Michener's most valuable contributions is his development of the space story against a backdrop of the social and political turmoil and the antirational tendencies of the time. Indeed, the most fascinating person in the book is the self-styled Dr. Leopold Strabismus, an out-and-out charlatan who runs a mailorder diploma mill for college degrees and panders to the multitudes who fear science and reason.

In Dr. Strabismus Mr. Michener has created the personification of the reactionary forces he finds gaining ground and threatening the spirit of intellectual curiosity that has made space exploration possible. And this brings the author to the message - and warning - that seem to have been his reason for writing ''Space.''

By the end of the book, which brings him to the space shuttle flights of today, Mr. Michener comes down heavily on those who allow the hostility toward space exploration to spread -from the space people themselves who were too single-minded to see it coming (and, it might be added, to appreciate the transcendent nature of what they were doing) to the politicians who supported the space program only for immediate parochial reasons (to beat the Russians) and ''the vast, sloppy, stumbling universe of people who could not keep pace with the discoveries.''

While the author's Senator Norman Grant is saying, ''I'm afraid we went too far too fast with the moon business,'' others with whom Mr. Michener identifies are remembering Randy Claggett's message from the moon, ''Keep 'em dreaming down there.'' Mr. Michener leaves us with the hope that the dream of exploring space will not die, even though humans may never understand who they themselves are or what makes them seek after knowledge of the unexplored.

John Noble Wilford, author of ''We Reach The Moon'' and ''The Mapmakers,'' reports on space exploration for The New York Times.

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Book review: "Space" by James Michener

This novel tells the story of the US space program, from its inception to the 80s, through a few leading characters - a German scientist specializing in rockets who was "grabbed" from Germany in the last days of the war (this is what the first part of the book is about), the man who brought him to the US and later became a high figure in NASA, a senator (from the imaginary state of Fremont) who supported the space program through a commission, and an astronaut, whose career is followed all the way from high school through Navy service in Korea as a pilot, through test piloting and a doctorate in engineering and astronomy.

The scope of this book is huge, which is also its major downside. There are really 2-3 full books in there, and reading this 800+ page tome becomes quite tiresome after some time, since things repeat a lot.

For comments, please send me an email .

Space: A Novel

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About the author

George Grizzard's distinguished career includes Broadway performances in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and California Suite. His film work includes Advise and Consent and Comes a Horseman. His many television appearances include his portrayal of John Adams in PBS's The Adams Chronicles and The Oldest Living Graduate, for which he won an Emmy Award.

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Praise for Space

"A master storyteller . . . Michener, by any standards, is a phenomenon. Space is one of his best books."-- The Wall Street Journal "A novel of very high adventure . . . a sympathetic, historically sound treatment of an important human endeavor that someday could be the stuff of myth, told here with gripping effect."-- The New York Times Book Review " Space is everything that Michener fans have come to expect. Without question, the space program's dramatic dimensions provide the stuff of great fiction."-- BusinessWeek "Michener is eloquent in describing the actual flights into space, as well as the blazing, apocalyptic re-entry of the shuttle into earth's atmosphere."-- The New York Times

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Space Hardcover – January 1, 1982

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 622 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Random House
• Publication date January 1, 1982
• ISBN-10 3945055571
• ISBN-13 978-3945055571
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Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 039452764X
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; First Edition (January 1, 1982)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 622 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 3945055571
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-3945055571
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3 pounds
• #7,668 in Astrophysics & Space Science (Books)
• #244,917 in Historical Fiction (Books)

About the author

James a. michener.

James Albert Michener (/ˈmɪtʃnər/; February 3, 1907 - October 16, 1997) was an American author of more than 40 books, the majority of which were fictional, lengthy family sagas covering the lives of many generations in particular geographic locales and incorporating solid history. Michener was known for the popularity of his works; he had numerous bestsellers and works selected for Book of the Month Club. He was also known for his meticulous research behind the books.

Michener's novels include Tales of the South Pacific for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948, Hawaii, The Drifters, Centennial, The Source, The Fires of Spring, Chesapeake, Caribbean, Caravans, Alaska, Texas and Poland. His non-fiction works include Iberia, about his travels in Spain and Portugal; his memoir titled The World Is My Home, and Sports in America. Return to Paradise combines fictional short stories with Michener's factual descriptions of the Pacific areas where they take place.

His first book was adapted as the popular Broadway musical South Pacific by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, and later as a film by the same name, adding to his financial success.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo byRobert Wilson [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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