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Beyond
Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space | Stephen Walker
4 posts | 2 read | 1 to read
Beyond has the exhilaration of a fine thriller, but it is vividly embedded in the historic tensions of the Cold War, and peopled by men and women brought sympathetically, and sometimes tragically, to life.Colin Thubron, author of Shadow of the Silk Road 09.07 am. April 12, 1961. A top secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Unions most powerful intercontinental ballistic missileoriginally designed to carry a nuclear warheadand blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin. And he is about to make history. Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hourten times faster than a rifle bulletGagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows he sees the earth as nobody has before, crossing a sunset and a sunrise, crossing oceans and continents, witnessing its beauty and its fragility. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing he has become a world celebrity the first human to leave the planet. Beyond tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight on its 60th anniversary. It happened at the height of the Cold War as the US and USSR confronted each other across an Iron Curtain. Both superpowers took enormous risks to get a man into space first, the Americans in the full glare of the media, the Soviets under deep cover. Both trained their teams of astronauts to the edges of the endurable. In the end the race between them would come down to the wire. Drawing on extensive original research and the vivid testimony of eyewitnesses, many of whom have never spoken before, Stephen Walker unpacks secrets that were hidden for decades and takes the reader into the drama of one of humanitys greatest adventures to the scientists, engineers and political leaders on both sides, and above all to the American astronauts and their Soviet rivals battling for supremacy in the heavens.
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1) The Challenger explosion — ironically, it made me fall in love with space.

2) Despite all my years working in bookstores, I‘m a library-first girl. Budget and space.

3) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as read by my 4th grade teacher, Mrs Allen. She had the unabashed nerve to stop at “turn on the lights”. 😡

Found via @StillLookingForCarmenSanDiego

Tagging @SilverShanica and @StaceyKondla

@Eggs

Eggs Love #3!! Thanks for joining in 🥰📚❤️ 3y
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Pickpick

A well constructed telling of both sides as the Soviets and the Americans worked to get the first human into space. From Yuri Gagarin‘s triumphant “Let‘s go!” to Alan Shepard‘s almost-broken hand, the reader is taken along on a fantastic ride.

I‘m still discovering new details with each book, even if they ostensibly cover the same events. Loving it!

Next up in my #spaceracereading is Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

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BestDogDad
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Pickpick

This is a really well done behind-the-scenes look at the early space race from both the USA and USSR sides. While the focus seemed to gradually hone in on our hero, Yuri Gagarin, as the book went on, there was a lot of interesting information regarding the USA‘s Mercury program and the launches and obstacles that led up to it; and a lot of comparing and contrasting NASA operations with that of the Soviets‘ Vostok space program. Fantastic!

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It‘s 60 years today since Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth for the first time, and this was a kindle daily deal today - so how could I resist?!

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