Here are 100 books that Space Craze fans have personally recommended if you like
Space Craze.
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One of the reasons I love my job as a Space History Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is that I am fascinated to learn how people think about space, the cosmos, and their human connection with the universe. I am always eager to get beyond questions of what we know and how we know it and ask: Why do we ask the questions we ask in the first place? The books I’ve listed here all explore our relationship with space and how we engage personally or collectively with space exploration.
This science fiction novel, written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the pen name James S. A. Corey, was the beginning of the Expanse series (now totaling 9 novels and additional stories). It is one of the best space science fiction novels of the 21st century and became the basis for one of my favorite TV/streaming series, The Expanse.
The books dive deep into the political, social, and cultural complexities of sending humans to live on the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt, and it’s a nuanced reflection of our current ideas and ambitions when it comes to spaceflight. I am particularly drawn to the depiction of humans who, after multiple generations off Earth, consider their primary identity to be Martian.
Humanity has colonized the planets - interstellar travel is still beyond our reach, but the solar system has become a dense network of colonies. But there are tensions - the mineral-rich outer planets resent their dependence on Earth and Mars and the political and military clout they wield over the Belt and beyond. Now, when Captain Jim Holden's ice miner stumbles across a derelict, abandoned ship, he uncovers a secret that threatens to throw the entire system into war. Attacked by a stealth ship belonging to the Mars fleet, Holden must find a way to uncover the motives behind the…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
One of the reasons I love my job as a Space History Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is that I am fascinated to learn how people think about space, the cosmos, and their human connection with the universe. I am always eager to get beyond questions of what we know and how we know it and ask: Why do we ask the questions we ask in the first place? The books I’ve listed here all explore our relationship with space and how we engage personally or collectively with space exploration.
The early years of spaceflight coincided with the heyday of American advertising and eye-catching mid-century graphic design. The visual aesthetic of the Space Age, as expressed in the aerospace advertisements that populated magazines and trade journals of the day, reflected this intersection of futuristic technology and innovative design.
Collected together in a critical mass in this book, these advertisements evoke an era in which tomorrow was the product, aerospace was the currency, and American industry was set to reshape the cosmos.
The late 1950s and early '60s were the golden age of science fiction, an era when the farthest reaches of imagination were fed by the technological breakthroughs of the postwar years. While science fiction writers expressed the dreams and nightmares of the era in pulp print, real-life rocket engineers worked on making space travel reality. The imaginations of many Cold War scientists were fed by science fiction literature, and companies often promoted their future capabilities with fantastical, colorful visions aimed at luring young engineers into their booming workforce. In between the dry articles of trade journals, a new visual vernacular…
One of the reasons I love my job as a Space History Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is that I am fascinated to learn how people think about space, the cosmos, and their human connection with the universe. I am always eager to get beyond questions of what we know and how we know it and ask: Why do we ask the questions we ask in the first place? The books I’ve listed here all explore our relationship with space and how we engage personally or collectively with space exploration.
The rise of spaceflight in the Soviet Union came amidst a very different social and cultural context than it did in the United States. While the Soviet program operated mostly in secret, with accomplishments often reported only after their successful completion, their public reception had little to do with their importance to state officials.
This book reveals an older Russian cosmism (or cosmic mysticism) practiced by some of the founders of pre-Soviet Russian rocketry, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose work tapped into an early wave of interest in space travel beginning around World War I. Public support and enthusiasm for spaceflight were genuine, rooted not in state-sanctioned interpretations of spaceflight but in a broadly shared utopian imagination and belief that the Russian future was in the stars.
The Red Rockets' Glare is the first academic study on the birth of the Soviet space program and one of the first social histories of Soviet science. Based on many years of archival research, the book situates the birth of cosmic enthusiasm within the social and cultural upheavals of Russian and Soviet history. Asif A. Siddiqi frames the origins of Sputnik by bridging imagination with engineering - seeing them not as dialectic, discrete, and sequential but as mutable, intertwined, and concurrent. Imagination and engineering not only fed each other but were also co-produced by key actors who maintained a delicate…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
One of the reasons I love my job as a Space History Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is that I am fascinated to learn how people think about space, the cosmos, and their human connection with the universe. I am always eager to get beyond questions of what we know and how we know it and ask: Why do we ask the questions we ask in the first place? The books I’ve listed here all explore our relationship with space and how we engage personally or collectively with space exploration.
When it comes to human spaceflight programs, a lot has been written about the astronauts, administrators, and decision-makers who set policy and defined these programs from the top. The People’s Spaceship presents the four decades of NASA’s Shuttle Program as a mission to engage the public in the excitement of space exploration and make spaceflight relevant to people’s everyday lives.
In a post-Apollo era of declining budgets, NASA’s outreach efforts during the Shuttle era demonstrate the agency’s increasing reliance on public support and the public relations apparatus it built to garner it. Despite the Shuttle’s flaws, NASA managed to create a sense of public ownership of the program, as well as generations of kids who grew up dreaming of their own Shuttle flights.
When the Apollo 11 astronauts returned from humanity's first voyage to the moon in 1969, NASA officials advocated for more ambitious missions. But with the civil rights movement, environmental concerns, the Vietnam War, and other social crises taking up much of the public's attention, they lacked the support to make those ambitions a reality. Instead, the space agency had to think more modestly and pragmatically, crafting a program that could leverage the excitement of Apollo while promising relevance for average Americans. The resulting initiative, the space shuttle, would become the centerpiece of NASA human space flight activity for forty years,…
Also known as “Margaret Mead among the Starfleet,” I’m a Princeton professor who has been embedded with NASA missions for two decades as a social scientist. I’ve observed missions to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, and beyond; consulted with NASA as a sociological expert; and written two books, with a third on the way. Growing up, I always loved science and technology, but not just for the ideas: for the people behind the findings, the passion they bring to their work, and the ways in which culture and politics play a role in how science gets done. Writing about this, I hope to humanize science and make it accessible for everyday readers.
“A rat done bit my sister Nell, but Whitey’s on the moon,” quipped Gil Scott Heron in 1970.
As the Apollo missions blasted into space one by one, they took off from an America rocked by the Vietnam War, a growing environmentalist lobby, and the transformative civil rights movement. We often forget about this overlap, but historian Maher recovers what was a rich exchange between members of these social movements and NASA.
After reading this book, I can’t think about JFK’s famous moonshot without thinking about the 1960’s culture wars and how this vibrant backdrop also brought America to the moon.
Winner of the Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award A Bloomberg View Must-Read Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
"A substance-rich, original on every page exploration of how the space program interacted with the environmental movement, and also with the peace and 'Whole Earth' movements of the 1960s." -Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
The summer of 1969 saw astronauts land on the moon for the first time and hippie hordes descend on Woodstock. This lively and original account of the space race makes the case that the conjunction of these two era-defining events was not…
I grew up in a small town, with a barn behind our house and an orchard across the street; nature was always part of my life. What made me more conscious of this was three canoe trips in the Quetico wilderness with my Boy Scout troop, where we saw loons, bears, and clear, sparkling lakes. I later became a political science professor, but I always hiked and camped, and eventually helped start an environmental studies program to share my passion with my students. I also learned about the growing threats we face from environmental destruction. These books helped shape my understanding of the problem and how to solve it.
I loved this book because it showed me the importance of grassroots organizing. The people in Appalachia were horrified by what strip mining was doing to their farms and communities, but couldn’t get help from their elected officials.
Even the big environmental interest groups were more interested in getting an agreement than in stopping the destruction of the land. They got some of what they wanted, but are still fighting to stop strip mining.
Surface coal mining has had a dramatic impact on the Appalachian economy and ecology since World War II, exacerbating the region's chronic unemployment and destroying much of its natural environment. Here, Chad Montrie examines the twentieth-century movement to outlaw surface mining in Appalachia, tracing popular opposition to the industry from its inception through the growth of a militant movement that engaged in acts of civil disobedience and industrial sabotage. Both comprehensive and comparative, To Save the Land and People chronicles the story of surface mining opposition in the whole region, from Pennsylvania to Alabama. Though many accounts of environmental activism…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
Spending my childhood in Nazi Germany, the nature and the horrific consequences of Nazi ideology have occupied me as a student of German history and later as a teacher of intellectual and literary history. In 1933 Car Schmitt opted to support the Nazis. While he was banned from the public sohere in post-war Germany, his ideas remained influential on the far right and the far left, fortunately without significantly impacting the democratic reconstruction of West Germany. It was the growing international visibility of Schmitt’s writings that became my personal concern after 2000. In particular, Schmitt’s increasing influence in the United States energized me to reread and respond to his writings.
Most of us are familiar with or have at least heard of the novelist Thomas Mann, the author of Buddenbrooks (for which he received the Nobel Prize) and The Magic Mountain. He is less remembered for his important work as a public intellectual, as a formidable defender of liberal democracy and bold critic of Nazism during World War II. Tobias Boes’s lucid and well-researched study focuses on Mann’s critical contributions to the public discourse in the United States from 1938 until 1948, first as a refugee and later as an American citizen, through public lectures, numerous essays, and radio addresses. This is the fascinating story of a writer who started out as a German conservative and turned into Hitler’s most vocal critic. Thomas Mann’s War is a timely book, reminding us of what it meant to stand up for democracy and defeat Fascism in the 1940s and what it takes…
In Thomas Mann's War, Tobias Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America's most prominent anti-fascists and the spokesperson for a German cultural ideal that Nazism had perverted.
Thomas Mann, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in literature and author of such world-renowned novels as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, began his self-imposed exile in the United States in 1938, having fled his native Germany in the wake of Nazi persecution and public burnings of his books. Mann embraced his role as a public intellectual, deftly using his literary reputation and his connections in an increasingly…
Born in Budapest, Hungary, Susan Rubin Suleiman emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She has had a distinguished career as a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard, publishing more than a dozen books and over 100 scholarly articles. Her acclaimed memoir about returning to Budapest, Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, appeared in 1996; in 2023, she published Daughter of History: Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood, a memoir of immigration which was a finalist for a 2024 National Jewish Book Award. She has been awarded many honors, including the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement in 1990 and France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur, in 2018.
This is another classic, published in 1999. Novick shows how the memory of the Holocaust evolved in the U.S. to the point where, in his opinion, it has come to dominate public consciousness in a way that may prevent people from paying attention to present problems. I think things have changed since he wrote his book, but he presents an argument that remains challenging.
Prize-winning historian Peter Novick illuminates the reasons Americans ignored the Holocaust for so long -- how dwelling on German crimes interfered with Cold War mobilization; how American Jews, not wanting to be thought of as victims, avoided the subject. He explores in absorbing detail the decisions that later moved the Holocaust to the center of American life: Jewish leaders invoking its memory to muster support for Israel and to come out on top in a sordid competition over what group had suffered most; politicians using it to score points with Jewish voters. With insight and sensitivity, Novick raises searching questions…
As a career journalist who has worked in print, online, on the radio and on television, I’ve long been intrigued by the influence of mass media and the vast technological changes in how information is transmitted that have occurred over the course of my career. Burnt out from the daily deadlines and transformed by a chance to work in the Kingdom of Bhutan, I began writing books and gravitate toward the “origin stories” of influential US entities.
Mitchell was the first person hired by NPR when it was first charted in 1970. He was appointed its first producer after the first initial, scattered year of production of its first news program, All Things Considered, which debuted in May, 1971. This is an excellent survey of the early years from the perch of a behind-the-scenes insider and offers to clues about how the network developed.
Public radio stands as a valued national institution, one whose fans and listeners actively support it with their time and their money. In this new history of this important aspect of American culture, author Jack W. Mitchell looks at the dreams that inspired those who created it, the all-too- human realities that grew out of those dreams, and the criticism they incurred from both sides of the political spectrum. As National Public Radio's very first employee, and the first producer of its legendary All Things Considered, Mitchell tells the story of public radio from the point of view of an…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
I started my career teaching high school. I attended amazing professional development institutes, where scholars showed me how the stories I’d learned and then taught to my own students were so oversimplified that they had become factually incorrect. I was hooked. I kept wondering what else I’d gotten wrong. I earned a Ph.D. in modern US History with specialties in women’s and gender history and war and society, and now I’m an Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University and the Coordinator of ISU’s Social Studies Education Program. I focus on historical complexity and human motivations because they are the key to understanding change.
This book is probably the first scholarly book that blew my mind and pushed me to want to know what else I had always gotten wrong.
Where, like most people I know, I had always thought that the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was just a thing that happened because of “war,” this book made it clear why it happened.
The US and Japan, both diplomats and everyday people, did not choose to understand each other. Different world views, different assumptions, and plain old racism led the US and Japan into a horrific, bloody conflict with long-lasting consequences.
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.”
In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book ... a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.”
Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret…
