The Year of the Rat Reading 21: "Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age"

One of the things that has interested me since I was a child is the Soviet Union. I think I am actually one of the few people who miss it. I don't know why it was so fascinating. I guess it was such an important country and a counterweight to the United States, which for some reason I have never been such a huge fan of. I think it stems from my sixth grade history class and from my father. We learned all about communism then, and after hearing about it, I thought it didn't sound so bad. Of course, I now know that the reality was a lot different from the ideal, but I still fixate on what could have been. My father is from Denmark, so I learned early on from visits there that there were other countries in the world that had different systems than my own. Denmark seemed to work, despite our constant harping of how great America was, so I thought maybe the Soviet Union also had much potential.
One of the great moments for the USSR (or CCCP as I learned from stamp collecting) was the launching of the Sputnik satelite. It put America on its heals for a few months in the fall of 1957. It was really just a tiny, insignificant object but it managed to do something that the might USA hadn't done yet.
This book starts off with the fall of Nazi Germany, and America and the Soviets trying to find some information from the German rocket program. This information helped both nations come up with some answers on how to get a rocket into space. The Soviets used the information, while America just captured a bunch of Nazi scientists. They had the papers, we had the brains.
In this book I learned a lot about Khrushchev and about Eisenhower. I was suprised at the role LBJ played in the whole affair. I recommend this one highly.