PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewRobert Kurson’s Rocket Men is a riveting introduction to the flight. The book takes off when Apollo’s massive launch vehicle, the Saturn V, rises — an experience like 'watching the Empire State Building leave Earth' ... If Rocket Men has a minor shortcoming, it is a sin of omission. Although Kurson’s source notes mention 'papers once secret' that 'have now been declassified,' he is silent on Operation Paperclip, the government program that sanitized the war records of Nazi engineers ... because this gripping book will acquaint new people with the space program, I wish he had touched on the program’s paradoxes and ethical complexity. Against a dark background, the triumph of Apollo 8 would not appear any less radiant.
Patricia Bosworth
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesAlthough Patricia Bosworth’s new memoir is set in the 1950s, it is urgent and essential reading, especially for young women. Parts of it are also terrifying ... in charting her young adulthood during the 1950s — and examining the suicides of her brother and father — she paints a harrowing portrait of a decade that, because of the recent election, is no longer a quaint horror in the distant past ... Choosing to write rather than perform, she has excelled at memoir, biography and literary journalism ... bravely bearing witness to the perils of an illegal abortion — at a time when a new political regime threatens to end women’s hard-won reproductive rights.
Karin Wieland
PositiveThe Los Angeles Times“In Dietrich & Riefenstahl," German historian Karin Wieland ostensibly compares the lives of two German-born movie personalities, actor Marlene Dietrich and director Leni Riefenstahl. In fact, the true subject of her dual biography is more ambitious: the contrast between good and evil.”