Word: gagarin
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...payload. The booster was as American as Werner von Braun, but it did not explode and the race to the moon was on. The Russians became nasty and secretive. They sent up a dog which died in space. The Americans sent up a monkey which lived. Yuri Gagarin (now dead) circled the world. Gus Grissom (now dead) let his capsule sink in the Atlantic. The fair-haired boy, John Glenn, was such a good astronaut that he went into politics and slipped in a bathtub...
...other novel is Windsong by Nicholas Gagarin '70 (New York: William Morrow, $5.95). Windsong received a sympathetic pan from the CRIMSON (he is former Executive Editor) and a brief, incisive kick to the groin from the Times. It is a somewhat disjointed account of one-boy-or-several boys life at Harvard. The amusements Nick's hero(es) engage(s) in are of the drugs-and-bizarre relationships variety, but plus ca change -of the two main girls in our little boy's life, he meets one at his St. Paul's commencement and another at a Fly Club garden...
Near the book's end, Hal thinks, "Maybe it's possible to go up and never come down, to stay up, to be always up, to be always stoned." As we and Gagarin know, that's the whole ballgame. But how did Hal find that out? The only answer is that he, like us, has read the other parts of the book. But that's cheating, and this novel, which aims very high, suffers severely as a result...
...Gagarin, who for a while occupied University Hall and later wholeheartedly participated in the strike, also finds a form of "up" as a result of his experience. In an essay about midway through the book, he pictures a structureless university-a school where all the tradition-honored rigamarole that someone decided was "education" a thousand years ago or so would vanish. This, too, is a kind of "up"-although if we were to really get up there, school itself would become a meaningless item-and Gagarin's explanation of educational ecstasy is as good as any I've seen...
...unlikeable character such as Hal certainly could work in a book, but only if the narrator has some distance on him and realizes his absurdity. Gagarin-as we know from the superior Esalen and Harvard portions of the book-has seen "up." Why couldn't he write about Hal from up there...