Gene Gurney (1924–2011)

Gene Gurney’s Flying Aces of World War I was one of the first history books I read growing up. As a boy, I was gripped by the stories of pilots in rickety planes dueling to death over the trenches of the Western Front, and the memory of their exploits stayed with me. Reading it again brought back fond recollections of pouring over its pages on my elementary school’s playground, but its limits also stood out in a way that they had not to me as a child. The book is narrower than its title suggests, offering potted biographies of eight pilots who served on the Western Front. Two of the pilots are Americans and a third is a Franco-American pilot; while this isn't surprising given its intended audience it does mean that the portrayal of the air war is a little skewed. Nevertheless, Gurney succeeds in writing an entertaining work that captures the excitement of air combat at that time, one that is a good starting point for young readers seeking to learn about the war and the men who waged it.… (més)

So...I found Gurney's Walk in Space: The Story of Project Gemini in an antique shop in February. Thrilling as it was for a guy who was born in 1961 (and actually has a Gemini memory - my father recorded the space walk from the television onto reel-to-reel), I went online to get both the Project Mercury book and this. Filled with exquisite technical details, Gurney's writing is conversational and accessible to pre-teens and adults.

He opens the book with Apollo 8, the mission I consider to be even greater than Apollo 11's, because they did so many things for the first time: first manned Saturn V launch, first to leave earth orbit, first to reach the moon, to orbit the moon, first humans to see the far side in person, first to return from the moon. Sure Apollo 9 and 10 demonstrated docking with the LEM and orbiting the moon at low altitude, but each only added one major element, as did Apollo 11. Okay, that one was a wee significant!

Gurney talks about the development of the program, the components, the failures, and ... the tragedy of Grissom, White, and Chaffee. The lessons learned from that, as well as those of the missions following Apollo 8...described here in wonderful prose.

Gurney wrote this after Apollo 12 returned, and before the historic miss of Apollo 13. He concludes this book with a nice nod to the Soviet program to that point, listing the different Vostok, Voskhod and Soyuz missions. He wrote with confidence that though the "Soviet Union does not publicize its plans for exploring space", he thought that they'd be landing on the moon. He also thought (this was 1970) that "{s}ometime in the 1980s, or later, the United States will land astronauts on Mars."

I wonder how surprised he would have been, when he wrote this, to know that 50 years later we haven't even gone back to the moon (he dies in 2011). But those were different times, and the excitement that was gone by the time Apollo 17 returned was still fresh. Excellent book for the 50th Anniversary year.… (més)

I like to sift and wander through antiques shops and even above the gadgets, gears and brass that attract me are books. I look for treasures. Some vendors know the values, some inflate them, sometimes there are just finds. This was one from a couple of months ago that I carved out a couple of hours for. It's not that long...I just savored it. The middle books of trilogies are more often than not fillers - not as good as the first, sometimes better than the last. I'd love to find his Mercury and Apollo books (okay...I just ordered them!) This is still epic stuff.

Detailed while eminently engaging, this is a story well told. Each flight; each crew; each success; each failure - yet the failures were successes on their own in solving the problems that need to be overcome to get to the moon. Gurney wrote well in this telling and I look forward to his other two about the space program.… (més)