Jamie Doran – Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin (1998)

Jamie Doran – Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

Whether we Americans like it or not, Alan Shepard was not the first man in space. The Soviet Union won that leg of the space race about three weeks before Shepard’s flight.

If you are younger than I am and are wondering what the big deal is, I suggest you read Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, which captures the American mood at the start of the Space Age and the American effort to catch up to the Soviet Union in the race to the moon.

This is a biography of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin.

Yuri Gagarin is one of the great heroes of the twentieth century, but the details of his life and the Russian space effort have been shrouded in secrecy: even the names of the engineers who worked with Gagarin were a mystery to the West for many years.

Starman is the first book to tell the compelling story behind Gagarin’s life and his audacious first flight into space aboard a converted nuclear weapon.

He was once the most famous man in the world yet in his life, as in death, he was a man the world knew almost nothing about.

Contents:
Dedication
Foreword
1 Farmboy
2 Recruitment
3 The Chief Designer
4 Preparation
5 Pre-Flight
6 108 Minutes
7 Coming Home
8 The Space Race
9 The Foros Incident
10 Back to Work
11 Falling to Earth
12 Wreckage
Epilogue
Afterword
Chapter References and Notes
Select Bibliography
Picture Acknowledgments
Plate Section

Format: EPUB
Length: 256 pages
Published: 1998 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 0747536880