Review 513: The Space Race

The Space Race: The Story of Human's Greatest Adventure by Colin Brake, Patrick Chapman and Richard Kurti
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 This was a full-production audiobook, blending history and fiction to tell the story of humans and their progress going to space. It is firmly focused on the United States with Russia as the adversary, while in the end being a joint contributor to the International Space Station.

I enjoyed the historical aspect, not so much the fictional portion. It felt displaced and bit hokey to include that. I understand what the authors were trying to do, show where we may go in the far future, but still felt oddly placed with the rest of the book.

Kate Mulgrew was the main narrator and her role was much like a documentary tv show. There were numerous interviews with a multitude of people and voice actors for roles of people who could not be interviewed, such as past presidents or astronauts or scientists who have since died.

Each chapter focused on a specific part of the space history, generally starting with the race to get to the moon. The final chapters dealt with the International Space Station and plans for the future, such as going to Mars. However, this book is already a bit dated as private space ventures were not mentioned other than foreseeing what could happen in the future. Also, nothing was mentioned about Artemis, the plan of the United States returning to the moon, nor any of the other countries who have since gone to the moon. So the book isn’t fully encompassing of human-space ventures.

This was not a quick read for me, as I listened to it off and only mostly when going on road trips. It ended up taking about a year doing it this way. I finally decided to just finish the last bit, not on a road trip. It’s the type of book that it doesn’t matter too much of there are long delays between chapters.