Eric BergerReseñas

Fantastic Story, fantastic book!

Essential reading for any fans of current day spaceflight who are unfamiliar with SpaceX's scrappy origin.½

Liftoff is a much needed history of SpaceX that is not centered on Elon Musk. Each chapter highlights a key employee, and a time frame in the companies history. It's well done, reaching a narrative climax in 2008, thus the "Early Days" in the sub-title. It carries it forward to the present, but the core story ends with the first successful launch, by any measure pretty damned exciting for a number of reasons. Berger gives a good sense of working in a small scrappy startup with an uncertain future. It's based on original interviews with many of the people involved.

I generally like the Great Courses programs and also like constitutional law, but this one managed to be brief enough to avoid anything actually interesting and yet also cluttered to not present the framework very well.

Best Short Shorts is a collection of short short stories--usually running six pages or less as here printed--from the 50s, 40s, and occasionally 30s. While some of the stories are mired in the idealistic 50s world epitomized by "Leave it to Beaver" and friends, the book in general is still very readable for a modern reader. A short short gets one shot at glory, and many of those in this volume don't quite make it, though only a few shoot completely wide of the mark. My biggest complaint is that the editor's lead-ins have a bad habit of revealing more than they should; I got in the habit of ignoring the italics at the start of the story.

Of the three science fiction stories in the book, one was an interesting little piece of alien life--though I'd warn about the italics especially for this one, one is a plot that seems to bewilderingly have come up in 50s science fiction repeatedly, but not since then for good reason, and the third is a classic piece of Asimov's, about schooling in the present and future.½