Vostok 1: First Human in Space

Children's Literature - Joyce Rice

From the first challenge by President Kennedy in the 1960s, Americans have been excited about space and all that we do not know about it. Images of spacemen and spaceships invade our minds as we try to separate fiction from reality. In this series, "Countdown to Space," treatment is given to six different events in our space adventure. The historic flight made by a Soviet cosmonaut in 1961 marks the beginning of our nation's obsession with space travel. The text makes interesting reading for the upper elementary student. The series offers excellent coverage of an important time in the history of space travel and is highly recommended for elementary media center collections and science classrooms.

School Library Journal

Gr 4-6-Cole commemorates three milestones in the history of space exploration. He enriches accounts available in general histories and encyclopedias with well-chosen details-the political reasons for including civilian engineer Gregory Jarvis in the crew of the Challenger; the fact that John Glenn's spacecraft was named by his children; and just what Yuri Gagarin, the first human to view Earth from space, saw from the window of Vostok 1. The author describes technical problems clearly, and turns each mission into a tense tale of danger, courage, and obstacles overcome-or, in Challenger's case, deliberately ignored. The information is backed up by endnotes, supplemented by plenty of small photos (many in color), and includes biographies of the people involved-though Glenn's subsequent career is not mentioned. Gregory Kennedy's First Men in Space (Chelsea, 1991) and books such as James McCarter's The Space Shuttle Disaster (Bookwright, 1988) cover most of the same territory, but Cole's fresh treatments offer an appealing blend of specific information and easy writing.John Peters, New York Public Library