Exploring Beyond: The Incredible Tale of the First Person to Venture into Outer Space

Mum: A good read for anyone interested in the space race of the 50s and 60s. Well written and informative with some very interesting facts.

United Kingdom on Jun 14, 2023

JBK: A good treatment of Gagarin and the circumstances of the first human space flight.

United States on May 27, 2023

David Hartland: Worth a read for 20th century history pundits.

United Kingdom on May 27, 2023

Mr. G. Savage: I was a bit put off by the initial time switching aspects and the emphasis on chimp ethics, but the final sections on gagarin's flight, with detailed and real-time stories from inside the vostok, the soviets on the ground, the Americans, and especially the stories of gagarin's family as the situation unfolded, are utterly mesmerising.

United Kingdom on May 25, 2023

Marco Costanzi: For youngsters today maybe the word "Cold War" is just a funny oxymoron invented by intellectuals, but those who lived it (including me), it is something that spells blood and tears. But even in that dark era and incredibly thanks to it, some of the greatest achievements of mankind were reached. And just a few years before I was born (i.e. in 1961) some men on both sides of the Iron Curtain struggled and lived and sometimes died, to make their country and its lifestyle prevail. This is a GREAT review of the stories of those men, first and foremost Alan Sheppard, John Glenn, Werner Von Braun, Yuri Gagaring, Gherman Titov and Sergjey Korolev, who made all those achievements come true.

United States on Mar 30, 2023

Ben GrimmBen Grimm: Which is better, the dreamy sense of dislocation you get with a great novel, or the heady satisfaction of falling into a whole new world that comes from really well-done nonfiction? Today I’m going to say the latter—but perhaps it’s because I’ve just finished Stephen Walker’s Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space.
Published in 2021, Walker’s book is the story of Yuri Gagarin’s historic first flight in space, accomplished in April of 1961 to the astonishment of the world. I wanted to say “as the world looked on,” but I couldn’t, because the feat was mostly over before it was even announced. In fact, almost no one was looking on. Such was the Soviet Union’s obsessive secrecy about its space program that few Russians even knew Gagarin’s name until he was halfway through his 108-minute mission, a single orbit around Earth in a Soviet-made Vostok spacecraft launched atop a converted R-7 missile.

The diminutive Gagarin—he stood only five feet, five inches tall—may have taken off as a nobody, but he returned from space a combination of Lenin, Lindbergh, and Elvis. He was the most famous man in the...

United States on Oct 13, 2022

Diggers: I was five years old when Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space for his single orbit of The Earth. I am guessing Stephen Walker was younger, but as children of the nineteen-sixties, we knew the names of the cosmonauts and astronauts who were propelled ever further, and for longer, into space. We knew there was a space race and gloried in the moon landings. The cold war and the close calls of that period were our parents’ problems.

Beyond combines the schoolboy’s enthusiasm for space and adventure with in-depth research into the human and technical achievements, and failures, that led to the historic moment.

It is a history lesson, with fascinating insight into the day-to-day preparation, including the, sometimes cruel, use of animals, which led to the ultimate goal of putting a man into space. It is also a story of human endeavour and high adventure.

We learn that it was a politically charged race between the USSR and the USA, with lies and deceit at the highest level. The people involved in rocket-building, in both hemispheres, had histories - the Second World War had ended just fifteen years before – the human driving forces had played their...

United Kingdom on Aug 02, 2021

Matthew Kresal: This spring marks sixty years of human space flight, which began on a spring morning with the launch of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit aboard Vostok 1. What led to that historic flight and the launch of American astronaut Alan Shepard weeks later has been the subject of much mythmaking and propaganda in the decades since. Telling the incredible story of Gagarin's flight and the events surrounding it is the new book Beyond by author Stephen Walker.

In telling the story of the first human space flight, Walker takes his readers on a journey through some of the chilliest years of the Cold War. Opening on the morning of Gagarin's launch, the book then makes its way forward, introducing the various figures whose lives and fates intertwined with the launch of Vostok 1. They include Gagarin and the "Chief Designer" of the Soviet space program Sergei Korolev, a victim of the Stalinist gulags now leading the Soviet leg of the space race, with Walker exploring the father-son relationship that sprung up between the two men. There are the witnesses to history, such as the filmmaker Vladimir Suvorov and Gagarin's American rival Shephard, as well as the back-ups to the men vying...

United States on May 22, 2021

Donald James: This is a magnificent book. Stirring, enthralling, and brilliantly researched. It tells the story of the race to put the first man into space with great narrative flare for those younger readers without much knowledge of the period - and with a wealth of fascinating detail for those already familiar with this extraordinary story.

Its focus on the Russian angle of the story makes the book very special. Stephen Walker fills his book with compelling personal details garnered from his own extensive interviews with the protagonists and those connected to them. He breathes life into their story and you are drawn irresistibly into the young cosmonauts’ amazing adventure. Walker is particularly compelling in his evocation of Sergei Korolev, the secretive mastermind of the soviet space programme, as well as in his description of the rivalry between the two front-runners to be first Russian in space, Ghermann Titov and Yuri Gargarin. The harsh realities of daily life faced by these Russians - who did all their training in secret – contrasts strikingly with that of the American astronauts, many of whom were already celebrities in the USA. With a wealth of anecdotal detail, Walker...

United Kingdom on Apr 13, 2021