Beyond

The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space

By: Stephen Walker

Narrated by: David Rintoul

Length: 15 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

“This remarkable account of the 1961 race into space is a thrilling piece of storytelling.... It is high definition history: tight, thrilling, and beautifully researched.” (The Times, London, front-page lead review)

“Beyond has the exhilaration of a fine thriller, but it is vividly embedded in the historic tensions of the Cold War, and peopled by men and women brought sympathetically, and sometimes tragically, to life.” (Colin Thubron, author of Shadow of the Silk Road)

09.07 am. April 12, 1961. A top secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile - originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead - and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin. And he is about to make history.

Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hour - 10 times faster than a rifle bullet - Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows, he sees the Earth as nobody has before, crossing a sunset and a sunrise, crossing oceans and continents, witnessing its beauty and its fragility. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing, he has become a world celebrity - the first human to leave the planet.

Beyond tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight on its 60th anniversary. It happened at the height of the Cold War as the US and USSR confronted each other across an Iron Curtain. Both superpowers took enormous risks to get a man into space first, the Americans in the full glare of the media, the Soviets under deep cover. Both trained their teams of astronauts to the edges of the endurable. In the end, the race between them would come down to the wire.

Drawing on extensive original research and the vivid testimony of eyewitnesses, many of whom have never spoken before, Stephen Walker unpacks secrets that were hidden for decades and takes the listener into the drama of one of humanity’s greatest adventures - to the scientists, engineers, and political leaders on both sides, and, above all, to the American astronauts and their Soviet rivals battling for supremacy in the heavens.

©2021 Stephen Walker (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers

Terrific story and performance.

I was curious about the life of Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space, and knew very little of the Russian cosmonaut program.
This narrative telling of Yuri’s experience juxtaposed with the US Astronauts like Glen and Shepard is truly remarkable.
Great research, insight and story weaving that create a sense of urgency and magnitude. When Yuri is about to blast off you become glued to the narrator and when the rocket finally bursts off the ground I yelled out loud in jubilation. Highly recommend.

Space Fan

This is the best account of the space race I have ever heard or read. I really enjoy and find fascinating the parallel telling of the U.S. program and the Russian program. To me there were very interesting similarities yet mammoth differences. The author has covered this peice of history in great detail but it is never boring (to me). I just eat it up. Thanks!

One of the best non-fiction thrillers

Mr Walker has clearly investigated the topic at great length. Unlike the American space program, the unredacted history of the Soviet space program has not previously been discussed. Mr. Walker brings back to life not only Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov and Nikita Khrushchev, but also the elusive Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov. He does so in ways that have most likely not been attempted before. A most remarkable and entertaining book.

Insightful and engaging

A fantastic account of the race for space with a great structural and thematic juxtaposition of the American and Soviet camps. The audio performance adds to the dramatic effect and is highly engaging. For someone who has been interested in the space race for two decades, this was a breath of fresh air. I would also recommend the book to someone with little or no familiarity to the topic, or anyone interested in the Cold War in general.

Superb

Absolutely superb. This is the best Audible book I have listened to, bar none. Thrilling, riveting, inspiring. The core of the story is a brilliantly narrated minute by minute account of Yuri Gagarin’s fantastical journey into space. The equally fascinating story of the space race, and the immense contributions of Sergei Korolev are also superbly brought to life.

Great Parallels and Contrasts with Mercury

Having read and watched much about Mercury through Apollo, I was eager to learn about our competition. This book is a wonderful story of the Soviet space program in its first half-decade in the context of the Soviet world and of the Cold War. The stories of Gagarin, Korolev, and the other cosmonauts is nicely done, with differences being reflected in their personalities and experiences. I highly recommend this to someone who loves anything about the Space Race.

Hard to put down

Very relevant mean and read the researched. Highly recommend it for history, buffs, space, lovers, and anyone alive in the last 60 years!

Fantastic story with superb narrator

Having read many books on the moon missions and missions that led to those Moon missions this account of the first man in space was unexpectedly fascinating and gripping. It is really researched and recounted with a very fine balance of detail and context. the author manages to really bring to life the people involved and their humanity as well as many lesser known aspects. It's clear that without this 'first' done by the Soviet Union at enormous risk that the US would never have reached the moon by 1969. The narrator is superlatively good and manages to vary not only his pace from slow scenes to faster tense ones, but even the accents whether his native British, affected American, or Russian names. This is one of the great audiobook experiences and you should not miss out.

Enthralling

Pervasively entertaining and engrossing. A revealing story of the successful Soviet accomplishment of putting the first man into space and into orbit. Lots of ups and downs and twists and turns. Plenty of personal stories dug up with the passage of time and regimes. Fair treatment of the flaccid effort by the USA at the time. Got to give the Russians credit and this book does that in spades. Pleasingly and competently narrated as well. Very easy on the ear. A must-have for all space freaks.

Incredibly Interesting

This book is incredibly interesting because it reveals the largely unknown (to an American audience) story of the USSR putting the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. The story moves back and forth between the familiar American effort and the Soviet effort, but focuses on the Soviet side. The story is well told and well paced, even though it is a bit on the longer side.

We learn that this race was extremely close and that the Russians had as many problems and setbacks as the U.S. The Russians were simply willing to take more risks than the U.S.--which was probably at least partially enabled by the fact that their program was cloaked in secrecy. Only successes were made public.

The book left me with a lot of respect for the two main Soviet protagonists: Sergei Korolev, who led the program, and, of course, Gagarin. Gagarin, who was unimaginably brave, seems to have been destined to be the first cosmonaut.

Although I really liked the book, I was less than enamored by the very British narration of David Rintoul. There are many quotations of President Kennedy in the book and Rintoul insists on imitating Kennedy in what is apparently his "go to" American accent, which sounds absolutely nothing like Kennedy. It is really grating because Kennedy had such a distinctive voice. He also uses this voice, or one very close to it, for other characters. Some narrators can pull off voices and some cannot. Rintoul should have just read the book.