 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | From Neil Sheehan, author of the Pulitzer Prize—winning classic A Bright Shining Lie, comes this long-awaited, magnificent epic. Here is the never-before-told story of the nuclear arms race that changed history–and of the visionary American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who led the high-stakes effort. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War is a masterly work about Schriever’s quests to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear superiority, to penetrate and exploit space for America, and to build the first weapons meant to deter an atomic holocaust rather than to be fired in anger.
Sheehan melds biography and history, politics and science, to create a sweeping narrative that transports the reader back and forth from individual drama to world stage. The narrative takes us from Schriever’s boyhood in Texas as a six-year-old immigrant from Germany in 1917 through his apprenticeship in the open-cockpit biplanes of the Army Air Corps in the 1930s and his participation in battles against the Japanese in the South Pacific during the Second World War. On his return, he finds a new postwar bipolar universe dominated by the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Inspired by his technological vision, Schriever sets out in 1954 to create the one class of weapons that can enforce peace with the Russians–intercontinental ballistic missiles that are unstoppable and can destroy the Soviet Union in thirty minutes. In the course of his crusade, he encounters allies and enemies among some of the most intriguing figures of the century: John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born mathematician and mathematical physicist, who was second in genius only to Einstein; Colonel Edward Hall, who created the ultimate ICBM in the Minuteman missile, and his brother, Theodore Hall, who spied for the Russians at Los Alamos and hastened their acquisition of the atomic bomb; Curtis LeMay, the bomber general who tried to exile Schriever and who lost his grip on reality, amassing enough nuclear weapons in his Strategic Air Command to destroy the entire Northern Hemisphere; and Hitler’s former rocket maker, Wernher von Braun, who along with a colorful, riding-crop-wielding Army general named John Medaris tried to steal the ICBM program.
The most powerful men on earth are also put into astonishing relief: Joseph Stalin, the cruel, paranoid Soviet dictator who spurred his own scientists to build him the atomic bomb with threats of death; Dwight Eisenhower, who backed the ICBM program just in time to save it from the bureaucrats; Nikita Khrushchev, who brought the world to the edge of nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and John Kennedy, who saved it.
Schriever and his comrades endured the heartbreak of watching missiles explode on the launching pads at Cape Canaveral and savored the triumph of seeing them soar into space. In the end, they accomplished more than achieving a fiery peace in a cold war. Their missiles became the vehicles that opened space for America. |
Average Customer Rating:   Compelling, readable page-turner You can find plenty of details here on the topics this book covers, but I wanted to point out that the writing is precise, concise, and engaging. If you have interest in military aviation, missile development, the Cold War, and the advent and consequences of the ICBM, read this book. If you lived through through the Cuban Missile Crisis, or at least know what it is, read this book, If you lived through the Reagan years, resd this book. If you're interested in the forgotten heroes of U.S. postwar invention, engineering, and mathematics, read this book. If you love the film "Dr. Strangelove," read this book. It will likely spin you off to further reading. A rewarding investment of your time and mind. MAD Peace Neil Sheehan tells excellent stories and A Fiery Peace is another great one outlining the massive contributions made by a small group of visionary leaders & thinkers, but especially General Schriever. Given the nature of the world today, it is hard to recall how different the world was at the immediate end of the Second World War - the tension, the relief, the bombast, the growing hubris of the American leadership. Coming out of that mix, it was fascinating to read how one man and a small group led by him was able to create an agent of war that was instrumental to preserving peace. And became a critical to the success of the US space program as well.
This book details the dedication, drive & determination one man had to understand and then realize how the world was changing in the face of technology and worked tirelessly to make certain the United States was positioned to be on the forefront of this change. Schriever's willingness to push strongly to achieve his vision is a great example of how to create success despite considerable obstacles.
Sheehan's book is a very engaging read and provides great context for the period in terms of technology, politics, & geopolitical issues. Having interviewed so many of the participants, the first hand observations are very rich and provide great insight into the challenges and opportunities of the time and of the project. And while you may know the outcome, yes Schriever does succeed in creating the ICBM, you find yourself rooting for him to overcome the challenges that are presented along the way.
I am quite happy that individuals like B Schriever are welcomed into the United States and subsequently contribute so much to the success, safety and prosperity of the country. Entertaining and informative look at a critical time in our history The publisher claims that "Sheehan melds biography and history, politics and science, to create a sweeping narrative that transports the reader back and forth from individual drama to world stage." Actually, that's an understatement. What Sheehan has done is put a series of human faces and personalities in their proper perspective in history in a completely entertaining book.
I lived through most of the time in history that he is writing about and remember the Cuban Crisis clearly as it was presented at the time. I also was trained to "duck and cover" in school and knew where every fallout shelter was in our local community. This book fills in what was really happening at the highest levels in our government and Russia during that period. The narrative is entertaining and filled with the personal histories and profiles of the people involved in the ICBM and space race and how they got us to the present day. The connection between MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) and our space satellite program and more than interesting . . . they illuminate how military science became part of the fabric of our lives today. We owe everything based on satellites today to this small group of visionaries in the late 40's to the 70's. Much of what we take for granted today was invented for the ICBM missile program and to spy on Russia's ICBM program during the cold war: GPS, world-wide TV, world-wide communications, advanced satellite-based weather forecasting, and so on.
One of the most important lessons of the book is how assumptions by our leaders and Russia's leaders that were not completely fact-based led to the cold war. We can see echoes of this in our current history. This is more than an interesting read, it is a reflection on what continues today in our government. It is also a lesson in how one man or woman can make a difference.
This is a must read book for history buffs, for those of us that lived through that era, and for our children to understand how conflicts happen between nations. What is more amazing about the book is that it is a fun and entertaining read, very hard to put down. It is about real American heroes: Highly recommended! Neil Sheehan's A Fiery Peace This is a most informative book. I grew up during the years in question. I have met Gen. Schriever and was delighted to know all of his contributions.
I recommend the book highly. An informative but flawed account of rocket development in the US This book is supposed to be about the history of rocket development in the US after World War II. This is an important topic, deserving a full book treatment. In reality, however, this book is a biography of Air Force General Bernard Schriever. This human interest angle in fact not only makes the book less interesting but throws the account of rocket development off balance.
Schriever's group was not the only organization developing rockets in the US, and his main competitor appears in the book primarily as an obstacle to Schriever's progress, but it was Wernher von Braun's group, which contributed the Jupiter missiles that scared the Kremlin when deployed in Turkey, the Redstone that sent Alan Shepard into space, and the Saturns of the Apollo program.
Schriever's biography, per se, is dull, and the book includes a short biography of every one of his main collaborators or adversaries in the Air Force. After a while, these biographies all sound alike: like Schriever, these men generally came from a modest background, distinguished themselves as pilots or aircraft logisticians during World War II, and went to school to get engineering degrees afterwards. Then they become difficult to tell apart.
In addition, the author also injects irrelevant or questionable opinions at several points. For example, it is difficult to make a connection between the uses Spain made of gold from the New World in the 16th century with rocket development in the 20th. He also describes the shapers of US cold war policies as paranoid about the threat from the Soviet Union, but Russian rocket specialists like Boris Chertok acknowledge today that this threat was real. The author is particularly critical of George Kennan, the key instigator of the policy of containment. What Kennan spelled out in the late forties, however, reads like a scenario of the Soviet Union's collapse in the 1980s. The only thing Kennan got wrong is the time scale, as he expected the Soviet Union to collapse in 5 to 10 years rather than 40.
The book also suffers from a lack of illustrations. The author travels back and forth in time when describing several characters, in ways that I found confusing on several occasions. Illustrations as simple as a graphic timeline or a genealogical tree of rocket families would have made it easier to follow.
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