The Man Who Ran the Moon: James E. Webb, NASA, and the Secret History of Project Apollo |
Buy The Man Who Ran the Moon: James E. Webb, NASA, and the Secret History of Project Apollo here, one of 750 Greenland History books offered for sale at discount prices here in the history books section at R bookshop. There are currently 75666 history books in our history books section, and over 1,000,000 books listed in our book store. We greatly appreciate your patronage at R bookshop and look forward to offering you a large selection of great books at discount prices now and in the future. Thank you for shopping at R Bookshop!
|
You Are Here: Home > History Books > Greenland History > Item 168
 |
The Man Who Ran the Moon: James E. Webb, NASA, and the Secret History of Project Apollo
|
by Piers Bizony
Sales Rank: 188704
|
Discount: 34 %
List Price: $24.95
$16.47
At Amazon
on 6-21-2008.
|
|
|
|
Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 256 pages
Published by: Thunder's Mouth Press May 3, 2006
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 1560257512
ISBN 13 Number: 978-1560257516
Book Dimensions:
8.8 x 6.2 x 1 inches
Weighs: 15.2 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Journalist Bizony's great corrective to NASA's mythologized history takes an unflinching look at how James Webb, a North Carolina farm boy turned Washington insider, ran his end of the space race as NASA's administrator under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Presiding over the agency during its build-up to the Apollo moon mission, Webb grew the agency into a research and development behemoth by leaning heavily on the old boy network: he called in favors, brokered backroom deals, bullied those who weren't in lockstep with his vision and commandeered vast sums of federal budget money-all the while driven, Bizony contends, by "pure-hearted ideals." Bizony shows both the spectacular successes and failures leading up to the Apollo lunar landing and discusses success's cost in terms of dollars, human life and political ambition. The book closes with a chapter detailing the crippling blows dealt to NASA by the Nixon administration, a time period that saw the beginning of the space shuttle project. Hampered by budget restrictions, NASA engineers had to design a "dangerously imperfect piece of technology" that later resulted in two famous disasters. Bizony laments the militarizing of NASA under Reagan and the "wavering" public support for expanding the space program, but this firebrand of a book should rekindle interest.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The prosaic side of space exploration--the politics of the aerospace industry--is insightfully illustrated in Bizony's biography of James Webb, who headed NASA from 1961 to 1968. Webb's imprint remains on the organization for good and ill, and Bizony's consciousness of Webb's legacy--a post-Apollo NASA unsure of its goals--enhances his retrospective on Webb's tenure. A lawyer who cut his political teeth as a New Dealer, Webb believed in large-scale government-industry coordination, and thought he was creating a model of "space age management" in his leadership of the crash program to land on the moon. His model collapsed with the 1967 space capsule fire that killed three Apollo astronauts; an investigation exposed deals cut by the manufacturer that snagged the contract. This pork-barrel underside to the history of Apollo is a crucial corrective to the traditional emphasis on astronauts and missions, and Bizony carries it off with investigative determination while retaining balance. Emerging from the bureaucratic thickets with an ultimately praiseworthy portrait of Webb, this should circulate with the space program set. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Reader Reviews
This long overdue biography of Jim Webb fills a needed void in the literature of the Apollo program. Webb, a disarming but astute partisan Democrat from North Carolina ran NASA during the crucial years leading up to the Apollo program. This book not only details his personal life, but the wheeling and dealing that went on behind the scenes in Washington to get to the moon. Nobody doubts that Webb was brilliant, but Webb was not without flaws. He was totally infatuated with Roosevelt-era New Deal big government, and ran NASA accordingly, sometimes to the detriment of the program. He adopted the mantra of "Space Age Management" and took it to mean a giant, monolithic government run program straight from FDR's playbook. I think the book does a great job explaining Webb's less than savory relationships to politicians and others of questionable ethics in both the Kennedy and (especially) Johnson administrations such as Bobby Baker. It also recalls a less than savory battle with fellow Democrat and political climber, Walter Mondale, that exposes Washington political opportunism at its worst. I rate the book four stars as the book tends to downplay the significance of ethically borderline issues that occurred in Webb's tenure. To the credit of the book, Bizony does correctly point out that Kennedy was not the true champion of space he is revered to be today, but saw space exploration as a politically expedient course to follow, as did Johnson. On the plus side, the author absolutely nails the deplorable history of NASA since Apollo and presents an accurate and devastating portrait of the Shuttle and International Space Station programs. Mr. Bizony correctly identifies the root cause of the problems in both programs as an unholy alliance of political objectives and unfocused technology. Webb's stature rose significantly in my eyes when I read Bizony's account of the hostility Webb had for Robert McNamara, another big government technocrat, but one without the vision of either Kennedy or Webb. NASA veteran Bob Seamans comes off as a much needed moderating force within the administration, and this book also details the fascinating relationship between Seamans and Webb. Overall this is a noteworthy book. While it occasionally seems to come off the rails and get sidetracked, Piers Bizony always manages to tie up loose ends, resulting in a detailed and historically important book. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the space program, and further to students of management to learn not only the successes, but failures of the biggest single peacetime logistical puzzle in history.
Comment | |
(Report this)
Back To Top
|
The Man Who Ran the Moon: James E. Webb, NASA, and the Secret History of Project Apollo
Available from Amazon
Price: $16.47
Updated on 6-21-2008.
|
NOTICE: All prices, availability, and specifications
are subject to verification by their respective retailers.
| We offer The Man Who Ran the Moon: James E. Webb, NASA, and the Secret History of Project Apollo and other related Greenland History Books here at Rbookshop.com. To view more books about Greenland History please use the previous and next buttons near the top of this page.
|
|
Search for books at
