THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 17, 1994 TAG: 9407130449
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
MOON SHOT
The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon
ALAN SHEPARD AND DEKE SLAYTON
Turner Publishing. 383 pp. $21.95.
SINCE AMERICA'S EARLY days in the ``Space Age,'' we have become blase about rocket launches and even such missions as the repair of the space telescope. This is our loss. There was something wonderful, something shiningly hopeful, about the early space flights. They were a symbol of the best that humans could do and appeared to offer a gateway not just to the stars but to a new future for the human race.
Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton's Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon, co-written with journalists Jay Barbree and Howard Benedict, recaptures much of that spirit.
Moon Shot can best be described as breathlessly enthusiastic and somewhat overdone. It is questionable how much of the emotionally charged writing is by astronauts Slayton, who died last year, and Shepard. (Shepard was the first American in space; Slayton one of the original NASA astronauts.) Accounts of the Russian manned space flights, told frequently in the first person, also cause concern for their admiring comments about Wernher von Braun.
But all of this does not really matter. The book sweeps us along, offering a sense of what the early astronauts must have felt, of their frustrations and their triumphs and of the tragedy when three of their own died in a launch-pad fire.
We see them at work and at play. Most importantly we share with them their excitement over leading the way for humanity. For a while we again experience the awe of what a few men accomplished and what it means for all people.
- FREDERICK HERMAN
A WRITER'S EYE
Collected Book Reviews
EUDORA WELTY
Univ. of Miss. Press. 280 pp. $27.50.
THE TWIN THEMES of Eudora Welty's fiction are love and separateness, reflecting a vision that at once affirms the community of souls and examines the individual's need for solitude, wrote Robert Penn Warren about 50 years ago.
A traditionalist emphasis, this - and a traditionalist emphasis of a different sort is found in this distinguished Mississippian's nonfiction as well. It is abundantly present in her most recent collection of book reviews, A Writer's Eye. Reviews dating from 1942 through recent years are included, each distinguished by Welty's ``engagement with the text'' of the books she reviews; in each piece she strives not to display her cleverness or her personality, but rather (as Joseph Conrad put it) to help the reader see - that is, to elucidate the text.
Her remarks on the words of William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, E.B. White and Rose Macauley are especially insightful and well-turned, though high quality is found throughout. Many of the books and writers examined here are not well-known today, but Welty brings close, honest attention to each of them, demonstrating an expertise in reviewing collections of ghostly tales. The vision in Welty's A Writer's Eye is altogether clear, true, sure-handed and unclouded by tub-thumping ideology.
- JAMES E. PERSON JR.
LIFT UP YOUR HEAD, TOM DOOLEY
JOHN FOSTER WEST
Down Home Press. 133 pp. $13.95.
THE LEGEND OF Tom Dooley, a Confederate veteran who murdered his lover, Laura Foster, has been told in Appalachia for over a century. Perhaps the best known version of that tale, a blend of fact and folklore, is the ballad recorded by the Kingston Trio. In Lift Up Your Head, Tom Dooley, John Foster West examines recorded facts of the murder, variants of the tale, and hypothetical motives, all in the light of his familiarity with the locale and its people.
West, a former English professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, was raised in Happy Valley, the Carolina Piedmont site of the murder. As a boy, he heard the legend told and retold among descendants of the Fosters and Dulas (the correct spelling of Dooley). His grandfather took part in the search for Laura Foster's corpse.
West's unique vantage point and his polished prose - he is a novelist and professor emeritus at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. - make this book an engaging glimpse at the Dooley folklore and its factual origins.
- LYNN DEAN HUNTER by CNB