In the tradition of Loren Eiseley, Arthur Koestler, and Lewis Thomas, Wynn Wachhorst is a great rarity: an author of truly lyrical essays on science and technology. In his hands, the drive to explore space is a mirror of humanity's profoundest aspirations and noblest urges.Each of the book's four essays is a montage of images and reflections on the dream of spaceflight and its historical meaning. The opening essay, a survey of major figures from Johannes Kepler to Werner von Braun, sees in the rise of spaceflight a metaphor of modern history as a recurrent story of transformation and rebirth. The second essay recalls the romantic vision of the decades prior to Sputnik, and sets our own nostalgia for those days against that era's nostalgia for the future. The third essay looks at the moon landing as the signature event of our century뾲he one that our descendants, a thousand years from now, will see as our greatest achievement뾞nd the fourth returns to the themes of transformation and rebirth, offering spaceflight as a cure for the withered capacity for wonder that afflicts the postmodern mind.
Wyn Wachhorst earned his Ph.D. in American history from Stanford University and has taught history and American studies at University of California Santa Cruz and San Jose State. His previous book, Thomas Alva Edison: an American Myth, was selected by Choice as an outstanding book of 1981. Two of the pieces in The Dream of Spaceflight are listed in Best American Essays.
