Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age

By Matthew Brzezinski
336 pp. Henry Holt and Company, 2007 $26.00

Reviewed by Zanne Miller

There were a number of books published in the fall of 2007 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Sputnik. Red Moon Rising, billed as a “behind the scenes” story of the race to space, fills in the back story behind the events that in many ways continue to change the way we live.

Matthew Brzezinski, a former Moscow Correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, has been praised for his storytelling power—and criticized for not adding any new facts to the record.  If you know little about the space race, cold war politics, and rocket science, this is an excellent way to learn something—actually, many, many things— new.  The book takes off like a rocket from the first page, drawing the reader into both sides of a suspenseful drama both human and political.

The book also has been criticized for being more entertaining than it needs to be, and it is easy to imagine that certain readers would lose patience with some of the more florid passages (describing for example, Glushko, the Russian engine designer’s “delicate, slightly feminine features and sensuous Asiatic eyes….Matinee idol-handsome”) while others might be tempted to skim past paragraphs of exhaustive scientific detail.  But either way, the pace of the story is not affected.

Brzezinski has immersed himself in enough research (there are more than thirty pages of notes) to provide context and color that seems effortless.  Deftly, Brzezinski fleshes out almost every member of the huge cast of characters (Nikita Kruschev and the rest of the Presidium; Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon; Sergei Korolov, the designer who until his death was not named; and Wernher von Braun) into living, breathing human beings, and he captures the mood of the Russian and American people equally well. For the reader, the paranoia and anticipation felt by both sides is made real.