Description:
The book explores the peaceful exploration of space, which became a launching pad for new visions of human community and peaceful collaboration during the Cold War.
Review Quotes:
Jenks describes how a handful of commissars and Apollo Lunar Module pilots saw space exploration as an alternative to the Cold War, but the ruthless apparatchiks who wrote the checks--Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon--were not the ones with their heads in the clouds. Their pieties about "universal brotherhood" were simpleminded and solipsistic, uttered in the hope that history would remember these two warmongers as better men than they knew they were.--Matthew Lavine and Alexandra Hui.