[FPSPACE] Review of new book on Wernher von Braun

[LARRY KLAES]

The October 22, 2007 issue of The New Yorker Magazine
has a review of the new book about Von Braun.

To quote:

Michael J. Neufeld, the author of “Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of 
War” (Knopf; $35), acknowledges that “hardly anyone under age forty” knows 
his subject’s name, even though America’s moon shots owed a large measure of 
their success to him. Wernher von Braun (1912-77) had a career that was 
itself a kind of two-stage rocket, his scientific dreams boosted toward 
their late American fulfillment by his youthful service to the military 
apparatus of Nazi Germany.

Disgusted and forbearing by turns, Neufeld, the chair of the Space History 
Division at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, offers this 
patient new biography as a corrective to the scientific and moral shakiness 
of the more admiring writers who have come before him. Using archival 
information that they neglected, he has nonetheless faced the same 
“inaccessibility of [von Braun’s] widow, his children, and his American 
relatives,” who seem to regard all biographical study of von Braun as a kind 
of posthumous deportation hearing, one that always carries the possibility 
of his being ejected from the American Cold War pantheon and repatriated to 
the ruins of the Third Reich.

Full article here:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/10/22/071022crbo_books_mallon