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Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War Audiobook
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A riveting history of the epic orbital flight that put America back into the space race. If the United States couldn’t catch up to the Soviets in space, how could it compete with them on Earth? That was the question facing John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War?a perilous time when the Soviet Union built the wall in Berlin, tested nuclear bombs more destructive than any in history, and beat the United States to every major milestone in space. The race to the heavens seemed a race for survival?and America was losing. On February 20, 1962, when John Glenn blasted into orbit aboard Friendship 7, his mission was not only to circle the planet; it was to calm the fears of the free world and renew America’s sense of self-belief. Mercury Rising re-creates the tension and excitement of a flight that shifted the momentum of the space race and put the United States on the path to the moon. Drawing on new archival sources, personal interviews, and previously unpublished notes by Glenn himself, Mercury Rising reveals how the astronaut’s heroics lifted the nation’s hopes in what Kennedy called the "hour of maximum danger."
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“What a fresh and refreshing look at a familiar subject, now seen through an important geo-political lens rather than a scientific, technological, and nationalistic one.”
— Ken Burns, filmmaker
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“Immersive history that lifts us out of the moment we’re in and transports us to a time of genuine heroes.”
— Matt Damon
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About Jeff Shesol
Jeff Shesol is a founding partner of West Wing Writers, a speechwriting and communications strategy firm, and a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. Before he became a speechwriter, Shesol wrote and drew the syndicated comic strip Thatch, which appeared daily in more than 150 newspapers. His book Mutual Contempt was a New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Critic’s Choice. He continues to publish widely under his own byline and appears frequently on television and radio. A Rhodes Scholar, Shesol got his master’s in history from Oxford University in 1993 and graduated from Brown University in 1991. He was the 2002 Anschutz Distinguished fellow in American studies at Princeton University, where he taught a course on the history of the presidential speech. He lives in Washington with his wife and their two children.
About Jim Frangione
Jim Frangione is an actor and audiobook narrator who won AudioFile magazine’s 2011 Best Voice in Mystery and Suspense for his reading of Philip Carter’s The Altar of Bones and Spencer Quinn’s To Fetch a Thief. He has won numerous Earphones Awards and has been was a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award. His theater credits include the off-Broadway production of Scrambled Eggs and the New York premiere of David Mamet’s plays The Old Neighborhood, Romance, and Oleanna, in which he also performed with the national tour. His film and television appearances include Joy, Transamerica, Spartan, Heist, Brotherhood, The Unit, and Law & Order.