Brinkley takes readers along for the race of a lifetime 

American Moonshot is no giant leap considering Brinkley’s crucial pantheon of award-winning nonfiction titles, but it is a thrilling one.  

Something was in the air in the 1960s; or, perhaps, it was the stars that had aligned to rouse some of the most turbulent and revolutionary events the modern world had seen. It would be those same stars that two world superpowers would shoot for. 

The political, social, and technological factors that would make the 1960s a turbulent decade also aligned to make it one of the most revolutionary periods in modern history. The year was 1962, and President John F. Kennedy had just announced his intention to put a man on the moon by the decade’s end. The first commercial jet airliner had begun operation only nine years prior, a revolution that launched the West into the Jet Age. In other words, such a goal alone was astonishing—never mind its ultimate success. 
Brinkley recreates the nationalistic fervor surrounding the Space Race in riveting detail with all-new first-hand accounts from the likes of astronaut John Glenn, rocketeer Wernher von Braun, and his own signature insights and depth of historical knowledge.  

Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, the CNN Presidential Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.  He works in many capacities in the world of public history, including on boards, museums, colleges and historical societies.   The Chicago Tribune dubbed him “America’s New Past Master”.  The New-York Historical Society has chosen Brinkley their official U.S. Presidential Historian.  His recent book Cronkite won the Sperber Prize while The Great Deluge:  Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.   He has received a Grammy Award for Presidential Suite and seven honorary doctorates in American Studies.  His two-volume annotated The Nixon Tapes recently won the Arthur S. Link – Warren F. Kuehl Prize.  He is a member of the Century Association, Council of Foreign Relations and the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress.  He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and three children. To learn more, go to www.douglasbrinkley.com.

 Guest host John U. Bacon is a journalist, public speaker, sports writer and commentator, and an educator at the University of Michigan. He is the bestselling author of 13 books including Three and Out, Fourth and Long, Endzone, and his latest book, The Great Halifax Explosion, an account of the largest man-made explosion the world would see until the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.