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DeGroot weaves a compelling tale. -Chicago Sun-Times Dark Side of the Moon is an elegant contribution to the history of the space age. -The Sunday Times The book is well written and quite engaging with its cast of colorful characters. -Choice,/p> DeGroot writes compellingly about the convergence of political, military, and industrial forces that produced the 'magnificent madness' of the space agency NASA in the 1960s... A fine writer with a real flair for storytelling has fun with NASA's extravagance and its tendency to look for complex solutions where simple ones would do. -The Financial Times DeGroot presents a chronicle of exploration, concentrating on the utter uselessness of NASA's lunar missions, boondoggles every bit as myopic and costly as the Cold War that spawned them. -The Atlantic Monthly

""DeGroot weaves a compelling tale."" -Chicago Sun-Times ""Dark Side of the Moon is an elegant contribution to the history of the space age."" -The Sunday Times ""The book is well written and quite engaging with its cast of colorful characters."" -Choice,/p> ""DeGroot writes compellingly about the convergence of political, military, and industrial forces that produced the 'magnificent madness' of the space agency NASA in the 1960s... A fine writer with a real flair for storytelling has fun with NASA's extravagance and its tendency to look for complex solutions where simple ones would do."" -The Financial Times ""DeGroot presents a chronicle of exploration, concentrating on the utter uselessness of NASA's lunar missions, boondoggles every bit as myopic and costly as the Cold War that spawned them."" -The Atlantic Monthly

An expose arguing that the Apollo Program conned taxpayers and provided a lavish, risky ego trip for technocrats and politicians.DeGroot (The Bomb, 2004; History/Univ. of St. Andrews, Scotland) crafts a winning formula: While peeling away layer after layer of the deceptions and spin that sold NASA's lunar program to the funding public, he indulges readers with a nostalgia binge of epic proportions. Although cautioning against finding any heroes in his reading of the case, he does isolate President Eisenhower as a voice in the wilderness, protesting, however faintly, against the massive expenditures he correctly foresaw would ultimately be required to administer a $35 billion happy pill to a depressed America. We were never behind, the author stresses, in the so-called space race when it came to developing technology with direct national-security implications; Ike knew it but couldn't say it because intelligence-gathering was top-secret. What the public saw instead was a Soviet circus with brutish booster-rockets throwing into space seemingly at will the first orbiter, then the first dog, man, woman, etc. All their failures were cloaked; all of ours screamed in headlines. The villains? DeGroot first fixes on Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi wunderkind whose rocketry, built by slave labor, had rained death on London. Ike and anyone else counseling restraint had no chance against the salesmanship of a visionary scientist with the requisite foreign accent. But it was John F. Kennedy, the author says, who insisted on a manned, space-based world-opinion coup-forget science-the gargantuan budget of which he would later come to rue. The author provides lots of philandering-astronaut stories and similar fun stuff to go along with the overview, all metaphorically topped by Enos, second chimp in space, who yanked off his diaper at his post-flight press conference and tried to fondle himself.Top-flight debunking takes all the air out of the moon race. (Kirkus Reviews)

Splendid.... An argument that comes through loud and clear, and is at the same time eminently readable and enjoyable.... DeGroot has a unique ability to characterize issues in a vivid and vibrant way. - Allan M. Winkler, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

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Gerard J. DeGroot is professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland. He is the author of ten books, most recently The Bomb: A Life, which won the prestigious [2004] Westminster Medal for the best book on a war or military topic.

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