George Leopold

Written in the spirit that Virgil "Gus" Grissom was "done wrong" by Tom Wolfe in "The Right Stuff," Leopold gives you a man who had an almost existential commitment to achievement, and who was one of the workhorses of American manned space flight, until that awful day in 1967 when Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died in the Apollo I spacecraft. Besides tracing the long train of events that created a deathtrap of a machine, a particular plus of this book is that Leopold doesn't try to pretend that Grissom was some victim of destiny. He was as hard-charging as anyone else in NASA in terms of beating Moscow to landing a man on the Moon, even when it seems quite clear that he realized that matters were far from right with what was supposed to be America's instrument of national greatness. Besides that, Leopold gives you a complete life of the man, and contemplates his impact in the years since his death. I agree with some other reviewers that this book could have been somewhat better organized, but if you're interested in Grissom, and the Apollo I disaster, it's "go to" reading.… (meer)