Sy Liebergot, David M. Harland
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By: Collector's Guide Publishing, Inc.
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15
Average rating: 4.5 of 5
A great, personal insight. 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful.
This book isn't one of those thick, literary historical tomes that we have seen a good many of in the last few years from former NASA managers. Rather, this feels like you have been personally invited into Sy's living room to sit on the sofa and look over his memorabilia while he tells you about it over your shoulder. It's a surprisingly frank and honest look at his life. Rather than trying to build himself up to be an historical figure, he pulls no punches with an account of a difficult, scrappy early life where he had to learn to survive his family, then work out how to leave and make something of himself. He tells this compelling story so well that I would have read it even if he had not gone on to join NASA - something I also felt when reading Scott Carpenter's account of his difficult upbringing in his recent memoir. When Liebergot moves on to his years at NASA, we get a refreshingly different account of how things worked there. Most other books on this era have been written by those in the upper echelons of management, but Liebergot here shows us what it was like for the footsoldier in the trenches, with a few little accounts of tempers lost in mission control and other disagreements that the official histories try and gloss over. Rather than do this as a tell-all, Liebergot includes his own failings in the mix - he doesn't hide the fact that he is now on his third marriage, nor the reasons. Liebergot was there for some of NASA's finest undertakings, and this book tells you what it was like from a human perspective - the weariness, the shortcomings, the oversights - that round out the picture very well.In short, this is not a polished history of NASA at its finest hour. Rather it is a very loose, informal journey through one man's difficult life, and how he managed to wash up in the right place at the right time.
Editorial Review:
The first ever memoir written by a former NASA flight controller, this amazing story includes insider knowledge of Mission Control in the Apollo Era and depicts both the major events that shaped him and the major events that he helped to shape. From his work on the first Saturn V launch to his experiences as lead EECOM fight controller for Apollo missions 12–15, this is truly an insider's recollections of some of the epic events in the national space program. He even chronicles a trip to Russia to work in concert with the Russian flight control team during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, relating anecdotes and facts from the Apollo Era and beyond. Also included in this thrilling account is a CD-ROM containing rare and important documents and audio files from Sy's career.
