Details the start of the Soviet space program into the early 1970s, including rare descriptions of Korolev, and the training and missions of the cosmonauts.

As far as space program books go, this was very thorough. It detailed the lives of all the Soviet cosmonauts in the first ten years of manned spaceflight, including the early ideas of space travel from philosophers, early rocketry, and Korolev’s drive to get into space. It’s a great reference book. But it’s heavily politicized around the Soviet Union. It gets tiring reading everybody’s title, and it seems like they’ve all been Heroes of the Soviet Republic even before joining the cosmonaut program. The narrative makes me wonder how much of the conversations reported were recorded or if most of them were made up with the “sense” of what the author remembered. Overall, the book was tiring in parts, but well written through most of it.

An interesting book, especially in that it has political overtones.  It says nothing about failures, and describes every cosmonaut as a perfect person.  But it does give a comprehensive and emotional look at the Russian missions up to the Salyut I station.  It is interesting that I just read an article in Quest magazine that describes the actual mission and failure of the Salyut 1 mission, and it is written in a much more impartial manner.  It was really neat to compare them.