Kurzbeschreibung
An investigation of the roots of the first moon landing forty years ago, "Dark Side of the Moon" reaches back to the reactionary modernism of the Third Reich, using the life of Wernher von Braun as its narrative path through the crumbling of Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazi regime. Von Braun, an opportunist who could apply only tunnel vision to his meteoric career, stands as an archetype of myriad twentieth-century technologists who thrived under regimes of military secrecy and unlimited money. His transformation from developer of the V-2 ballistic missile for Hitler to an American celebrity, as the supposed genius behind the golden years of the US space programme in the 1950s and 1960s, raises questions about the culture of the Cold War, the shared values of technology in totalitarian and democratic societies, and the imperatives of material progress.
Über den Autor
Wayne Biddle won a Pulitzer Prize for his The New York Times reporting on the Star WarsA" anti-missile project. He has written three nonfiction books and is a member of the writing seminars faculty at the Johns Hopkins University.