Volume 44, Number 11 · June 26, 1997
A Magnificent Failure
By Al Alvarez
The Worst Journey in the World
by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Carroll and Graf, 607 pp., $16.95 (paper)
In the second half of this century, the great unknown for explorers has been space. But the exploration of space is a highly technical project and, forty years after it began, we still don't know much about it back on earth because NASA has yet to find room on a spacecraft for anyone who is able to put his experience into words. The astronauts have videotaped fragments of life in space and Hollywood has glamorized it, but The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe's imaginative recreation of what it might have been like, is as near as we get to the thing itself. We still don't know how it really feels to be blasted off beyond the pull of gravity, or how you live weightless and apparently in slow motion while the capsule circles at an insane speed in that huge darkness. We don't even properly know what our planet looks like from out there in space. The astronauts are too busy with their scientific chores to bother with anything else. Even if they knew how it was done, writing about the experience is not one of their concerns. As they report it, life in space sounds not much different from a spell in a Best Western motel in Topeka, Kansas.
Review, 4500 words
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