Beyond the Known: How Exploration Created the Modern World and Will Take Us to the Stars

A children’s author and SpaceX engineer, Rader (Mars Rover Rescue) offers an expansive, overly ambitious look at human exploration. Packed with information, the work testifies to Rader’s extensive research into, and avid enthusiasm for, the subject. He addresses common myths, such as that Europeans, during their first expeditions to the Americas, believed the Earth to be flat. To that end, he observes that, by the Middle Ages, the Earth’s spherical shape “would have been second nature to sailors who... observed the horizon’s curvature on a daily basis.” While Rader notes exploration’s negative repercussions, he doesn’t sufficiently address them. For instance, he glosses over Columbus’s atrocities with such statements as the navigator noting “the gentle indigenous people would make ideal servants, so he kidnapped a few.” Similarly, when addressing the mid-20th-century space race, Rader fails to comprehensively explore the complex legacy of German-born NASA rocket engineer Wernher von Braun—in particular, his earlier service on behalf of the Third Reich. Rader falls short of his goal—transmitting to the reader his excitement for the future of exploration, particularly of the solar system—by failing to fully to do justice to its past. Agent: Bonnie Solow, Solow Literary. (Nov.)