This review was first published by Booklist on May 3, 2019.

Heroes of the Space Age offers profiles of eight individuals who played significant roles in the early days of the Space Age, from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, including the first men and women in space (Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn, and Valentina Tereshkova), the first men on the moon (Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin), and the first man to occupy a space station (Pete Conrad). Significantly, Pyle (Interplanetary Robots, 2019) includes people in pivotal roles on the ground: Gene Krantz, NASA flight controller during the first moon landing, and Margaret Hamilton, who designed the computer software for the Apollo missions. The author notes he sought to include diversity in these profiles, though the space race at that time was largely homogeneous. Each biography is brief but complete, though of greatest interest are the accounts of the work these individuals did as part of the space program. This is not a comprehensive collection of the hundreds of individuals involved but it’s a solid history of the earliest days of our exploration of space.

This review was first published by Booklist on January 1, 2019.

**STARRED REVIEW** Midnight in Chernobyl is a top-notch historical narrative: a tense, fast-paced, engrossing, and revelatory product of more than a decade of research. Higginbotham interviewed most of the surviving central participants in the disaster, examined volumes of newly declassified Soviet documents, and surveyed previous research and reportage. The result is a stunningly detailed account of the explosion of Reactor Four at the Chernobyl nuclear-power plant on April 26, 1986. It offers a brief history of the development of the Soviet nuclear-power program leading up to the construction of the plant at Chernobyl, a second-by-second account of the night of the accident, the confluence of causes, the evacuation of the surrounding countryside, the containment and cleanup efforts, and a deep dive into the aftermath: the medical and environmental consequences, the political machinations and missteps, the role Chernobyl played in the downfall of the USSR, and the effect it had on the pursuit of nuclear power worldwide. For all its wealth of information, the work never becomes overwhelming or difficult to follow. Higginbotham humanizes the tale, maintaining a focus on the people involved and the choices, both heroic and not, they made in unimaginable circumstances. This is an essential human tale with global consequences.