Wernher von Braun is an iconic figure of the 20th century, someone
who built deadly missiles for Adolf Hitler and the Saturn V rockets
that sent Americans to the Moon. Michael J. Neufeld's long-awaited
biography, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, steers a
course between the extremes of demonization and hagiography. "Von
Braun has often been depicted as a saint or a devil, as a hero of
spaceflight or as a Nazi war criminal," observes Neufeld. "It is
comforting to pigeonhole him as either white or black," he goes on to
explain, "because then one does not have to deal with his ambiguity
and complexity, or the ambiguity and complexity of the moral and
political choices offered to scientists and engineers in the modern
era." Neufeld's thorough, nuanced, insightful account does this
challenging subject justice.
Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. Michael J. Neufeld. xvi
+ 587 pp. Knopf, 2007. $35.
<http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/57120>Link
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