The Race: The Complete True Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon

When young Jim Schefter was a stringer for the Houston Chronicle and later Life magazine, he scored the plum reporting assignment of the 1960s--close-up coverage of the tense, heady race to space between the Americans and the Soviets. That pivotal decade in space exploration gave us near misses, giddy victories, and tragic failures that are hard to even imagine now as we yawn at the ubiquitous "routine shuttle launch." But the space race back then was deadly serious stuff: America's best and brightest scientists were teamed up with bold cowboy astronauts to win what was then seen as the most visible, most crucial battle in the cold war. And Jim Schefter--thanks to an exclusive contract Life had inked with the astronauts and their families--sat front-row center, from the earliest launches on to Neil Armstrong's hastily composed words as he stepped off the Eagle.

Armed with copious notes, reams of NASA and Soviet documents, and countless closed-door, at times embarrassing anecdotes, Schefter recounts the tit-for-tat one-upmanship of those early days in The Race, going as far back as the post-WWII grab for Nazi rocket technology (Schefter reveals that many joked at the time that the U.S.-Soviet race was being conducted by the Germans--"our Germans versus their Germans"). Schefter ably conveys the era's tension and exhilaration, jumping back and forth between the U.S. and Russian teams with smart, Superfriends pacing (think "meanwhile, back at the Hall of Justice..."), while also offering up solid historical and technical context and many uncomfortably funny asides (including stories about masturbating space monkeys and drunken astronauts out to stud). --Paul Hughes