Final Frontier
Regular price
€25.99
A01=Dale Carter
Author_Dale Carter
Category=JBCC
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gravitys
pynchon
rainbow
thomas
Product details
- ISBN 9780860919087
- Weight: 375g
- Dimensions: 140 x 220mm
- Publication Date: 01 Feb 1988
- Publisher: Verso Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Stunned by the news of Sputnik in 1957, the American public were to be treated over the next dozen years to the spectacle of an all-out national crusade: the race to beat the Russians to the moon. What few understood at the time - and what has largely been obscured in popular representations of this episode in movies and bestsellers - was the key economic and technical role played by manned space exploration in post-war US capitalist expansion. From Potsdam to Cape Canaveral, the yellow brick road twisted and turned, but its ultimate goal remained clear: the Oz of global American economic and political domination.
Taking off from that masterpiece of American fiction, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Dale Carter tells the lurid tale of the postwar boom, through the history of the manned space program. Salvaged from the ashes of Nazi Germany (Pynchon's 'Oven State'), as US officials rounded up the Third Reich's leading V-2 scientists, the American Rocket State embarked on an upward path that would culminate in the epochal voyage of Apollo XI in 1969. Following this path, Carter gives an innovative, brilliant account of American culture and society during the Cold War. He charts the ideological and political significance of a range of phenomena, from films like High Society, Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide to John F. Kennedy's rise to power, from the emergence of a new high-tech economy fueled by the NASA-led transformation of the aerospace industry to the last flight of the space shuttle Challenger. His highly original account of the star-spangled space age sets a new standard for the study of American culture.
Taking off from that masterpiece of American fiction, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Dale Carter tells the lurid tale of the postwar boom, through the history of the manned space program. Salvaged from the ashes of Nazi Germany (Pynchon's 'Oven State'), as US officials rounded up the Third Reich's leading V-2 scientists, the American Rocket State embarked on an upward path that would culminate in the epochal voyage of Apollo XI in 1969. Following this path, Carter gives an innovative, brilliant account of American culture and society during the Cold War. He charts the ideological and political significance of a range of phenomena, from films like High Society, Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide to John F. Kennedy's rise to power, from the emergence of a new high-tech economy fueled by the NASA-led transformation of the aerospace industry to the last flight of the space shuttle Challenger. His highly original account of the star-spangled space age sets a new standard for the study of American culture.
Dale Carter has taught US history at the University of Warwick and is currently working on a study of Anglo-American relations in the Southwest Pacific.
