Jeffrey Kluger

Outstanding nonfiction about the Apollo 13 mission. Lovell & Kluger manage to hold the technobabble to a bare minimum, though the verbatim calldowns through the different mission control consoles gets a bit wearing.

While the bulk of the book details the mission itself, its multitude of disastrous systems failures, and the incredible Earthside and spaceborne efforts to get the crew home safely, there is also background about Lovell's career, as well as a chilling review of the post-mission show more investigation into the root cause of the command module explosion that doomed the lunar landing.

There's also a fair amount of attention paid to Marilyn Lovell, both during the hair-raising mission itself and to the general substructure of astronaut wives and the support system they created among themselves.

Much of this material will be familiar to readers who have followed the beginnings of America's manned space program, whether readers lived through that period with the first glimmerings of the Mercury program in 1958 through the last, sad Apollo mission in 1972, or whether their only exposure to it has come second-hand through memoirs and documentaries. Yet nothing seems quite so fraught, quite so heartbreaking, or quite so edge-of-the-seat suspenseful, as those six days in 1970 when America, and the world, were brutally reminded that man-in-space was not routine, and that the technology that got us out there could also fail us with disastrous results. show less

It snuck up on me. I began thinking I was reading something diverting, began to worry that it might be mewling, and finished believing I had read something important. In this mix of "hard" astronautics, family drama and, political maneuvering, Kluger manages to paint a picture of social media working at its best, in a time when it always seems to be at its worst. Does that make it a fantasy? Maybe. But we might more generously call it an aspiration.

If you want information about how human beings first circled the moon, this book is for you. If you want to know how it all worked... maybe not so much.

Start with the good, which is very good: The book covers the politics and the personalities -- how the Apollo program first took human beings out of low earth orbit, and it does it very well. We see both the human side (the astronauts and their wives -- maybe a little too much on that) and the political (how the Apollo 1 fire led to all sorts show more of worries about the future of the program). The book is very readable and well-done in that regard. I could have used a little less on Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman (who gets the lion's share of the attention), but that's because I just don't like Borman much. I didn't before I read this book, and the stories here show that I was right; he's just too fond of hierarchies and being the boss. Those who aren't as rebellious as I am may find that enjoyable rather than obnoxious.

So: Good book.

Don't trust it.

I say that as a physicist. You'd think that an author who is a science writer would know his stuff, but I ended up with a long list of errata. I wrote to the publisher about this, asking if these would be corrected in a final edition (mine is an advanced reader's copy). As of this writing, there has been no answer, so I have to assume not. There are some errors in the history, and the physics is just BAD. Bad enough that, after long consideration, I knocked my rating down from four and a half stars to three.

First, the historical errors. Page 30: "America's fleet little Vanguard booster... exploded on the pad." This part of the text implies that this was a NASA failure. But it wasn't; by the time NASA was formed in October 1958, Vanguard 1 was in orbit. Explorer 1 had gone up earlier. Explorer 1 (which is not mentioned in the book, and in this context, it should have been) was an Army project; the Vanguard program was run by the Navy. Not NASA.

Page 88 describes Deke Slayton as a "B-52" pilot who had flown in combat. The plane was not the B-52, which did not exist in World War II; Slayton flew the B-25 Mitchell bomber.

Oh, and if you want non-nuclear man-made noises louder than a Saturn V -- look up the Halifax Explosion.

And then there is the physics. Examples. Page 41 talks about walking in space: "climb outside and walk -- actually walk -- in space." That's "climb outside and float -- actually float in space." Unless someone set up a walking path in low earth orbit, anyway, in which case you could "hit your foot on the solid surface and be pushed -- actually be pushed, by Newton's good old Third Law -- away from the surface you just pushed against. And away from the spacecraft, where you could "die -- actually die -- of being stupid enough to try walking in zero gravity." Oy.

The farrago of units on page 105 is meaningless, and horsepower (force) is not a unit of thrust (energy)! You cannot equate them, any more than you can equate the wattage of your light bulb with the amount of energy shown on your light bill.

Page 107: "weighed twice as much as it actually did." Mass is not weight. The spacecraft was in orbit. Its weight was negligible. Trying to equate the two, in space, will get you dead fast. Oh, and there is no such thing as negative weight (p. 107), or negative mass, which I think is what Kluger means. Helium has mass, just not much of it.

Page 226: "Asymmetrical ellipse." By definition, an ellipse is symmetric about either of its axes, asymmetric anywhere else. What Kluger is talking about, I think, is the fact that the foci of an ellipse are not at its center. As for circularizing the ellipse (p. 230), the burn didn't circularize it, just decreased the eccentricity of the ellipse until it was not very far from being a circle.

Page 251: You do not accelerate in feet per second. You accelerate in feet per second per second (or meters per second per second, if you're a modern physicist).

Enough. I'm sure this all sounds incredibly nitpicky. From a physics standpoint, it's not, and if there are any physicists out there who are thinking about reading this book, be prepared to go nuts. For the rest of you, it may be fine. Just -- if Kluger has his physics that wrong, can we trust him on anything else? show less

The author is an editor at “Time Magazine” and is clearly adept at creating entertainment suitable for magazine articles. But he should have limited himself to that medium. This work is a book-long plunge into pop psychology replete with the usual logical fallacies that stem from lack of rigor, peppered by entertaining anecdotes reflecting Kluger's opinions about people, whether positive or negative.

Kluger begins by defining Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or NPD, and then proceeds to show more manipulate data and anecdotes in a procrustean fashion to fit his premise.

According to the psychiatric designation in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM),” NPD is defined as:

“…in effect, three conditions: a toxic mash-up of grandiosity, an unquenchable thirst for admiration and a near-total blindness to how other people see you. But those are only the broadest features. There is, too, a lack of empathy in the narcissist - an utter inability not only to understand what other people are feeling but how they may be responsible for those feelings, especially when they’re bad.”

Kluger adds some other traits to the list: a bottomless appetite for recognition, attention, glory, and rewards; an outsized sense of entitlement; a willingness to take advantage of other people for one’s own gain; a conviction they are too clever to get caught at malfeasance; an indifference to any harm they do to others; and a profound sense of grievance when their schemes don’t work out.

You may be thinking, wow, that’s the U.S. President. And in fact, ironically enough, Kluger began the book, published in 2014, with a profile of Donald Trump, who indeed fit the definition pretty well. And this was before he had the power to act on all the characteristics of NPD to a destructive level only seen historically in the worst authoritarian leaders.

But Trump is a happy exception, we might say, to Kluger’s tendency to apply the definition of NPD willy-nilly and not always appropriately to people. Kluger admits his diagnosis is descriptive “more or less” or “often” and “on a continuum.” If Ingrid Bergman got divorced from her quiet doctor husband to marry a sexy [sic] Italian director, it was, according to Kluger, because she was a narcissist; not, say, because she and her husband grew apart from each other, or even because her husband opted against staying with her anymore. If Taylor Swift has gone through a lot of boyfriends, again it is because of narcissism, with no consideration that it might be difficult for young males to be the partner of one of the most popular and highly-paid pop stars in the world who is besieged by paparazzi, giving the couples little chance for privacy or normalcy. Warren Beatty was (at first) a narcissist, per Kluger, because he allegedly slept with a lot of women, but then he grew out of it somehow when he met Annette Bening. On the other hand, maybe when he was a young, attractive Hollywood star, women were throwing themselves at him, and he, like many other young men would do in that position, could not or did not see a reason to resist.

At the back of the book, the author reprints the Narcissistic Personality Inventory Test used for self-classification of narcissists. The nature of the questions seems directly to contradict the definition of a narcissist. If, as suggested, narcissists have no idea how un-wonderful they are, why would they be able to rate themselves realistically? And where is the line drawn between narcissism and, say, self-confidence? Kluger points out, for example, that Tom Hanks is an admirably nice person. But clearly he is self-confident. What is the distinction between him and others Kluger mentions besides the fact that Kluger likes Hanks and dislikes those he considers narcissists? And when is behavior simply bad or even pathological rather than “narcissistic?” Kluger describes some of the thoughts expressed by the two boys who went on a shooting spree at Columbine High School. He classifies them as “narcissists.” Wouldn’t they more realistically be labeled as sociopaths?

In short, it seems like “narcissism” describes whomever and whatever Kluger wants it to describe. To support his thesis he cherry-picks data and does not consider other explanations for the same phenomena. Scientific rigor is not his strong suit. E.g., that Carly Simon allegedly was targeting Warren Beatty with her song “You’re So Vain” is evidence of nothing. The section ranking all U.S. Presidents based on very biased and very incomplete information is particularly bizarre. Yes, now we have some audiotapes that reveal presidential conversations, but for most of U.S. history, the motives and behaviors of presidents were opaque. From the very beginning, George Washington, who was extremely conscious of his historical legacy, carefully oversaw and curated what would be written about him, and instructed Martha to burn all their letters. How are these “ratings” based on manipulated legacies (and/or histories that are generally written with an eye toward shaping collective memory) even informative?

Kluger regularly confuses or conflates correlation with causation, as in the cases of Taylor Swift and Ingrid Bergman. And, as mentioned above, he is apt to change or modify his definitions when he can’t get the data to fit any other way.

Evaluation: While Kluger’s book has lots of diverting anecdotes, I don’t think it should have been couched in a form purporting to be “science.” Jim and I read this for a book club, and because of its controversial premises, gossipy content, and near universal applicability, it did make a great selection for discussion. show less