I Really Tried to Like It

I really wanted to like Rocket Man by David A. Clary. I very much wanted to like this book. After all, Robert Goddard is a boyhood hero of mine. It's been too long since his accomplishments have been brought to the attention of a public that thinks we've always been able to fly in space. Heck, the cover of the book has quote from Arthur C. Clarke, "Rocket Man is a long overdue tribute to one of the greatest engineers of the Twentieth Century—whose work helped change the future of this and many other worlds.

Hello? Are we talking about the same book here? This was a terrible book on several fronts. My biggest complaint is that Clary seems shocked, shocked that Robert Goddard was not perfect. Finding him to have feet of clay, he spends much of the book shooting at those feet. Then he spends a smaller portion of the book contradicting himself and a very tiny portion of the book praising Goddard. It took me nearly the entire year to get through the book, so many times did I walk away in anger or disgust, constantly restraining myself from hurling the book against the wall.

Two examples. First, Clary berates Goddard for not following up on early radio and electronics work, work that became the basis (he asserts) for much of the later radio industry. But later in the book her berates Goddard for "wasting" time going after RCA for patents when it seemed that RCA had benefited from Goddard's early work. Second, Clary spends a lot of time complaining that Goddard either worked in what Clary felt were dead ends in rocketry or areas that had no immediate payoff. A prime example was the quest that Goddard had in trying to develop gyroscopic controls for rockets. But then in the final pages of the book, Clary shows how a rocket...using all these "dead-ends"...took man to the Moon.

Sigh. I really tried to like this book. Maybe in a few years somebody will undertake the project again (as well as similar projects for the other so-called "fathers of rocketry") and we'll get something worth reading.