There was a time when Willy Ley was something of a celebrity only to wind up being a lost exemplar of a certain style of science. Consciously harking back to the romantic naturalism of Alexander von Humboldt, Ley would have liked nothing more than to be some sort of explorer, except that the circumstances of Weimar Germany short-circuited the man's education. Instead, Ley fell into the career of a science writer (despite his ambitions to become a genuine rocket scientist), wound up being the impresario of space exploration in the 1950s and essentially did as much as anyone to create the public image of Werner von Braun as an American technological hero. As to why Ley is not especially well remembered, Buss suggests that this is due to a certain amount of disdain by academic historians of science who were dubious about Ley's lack of professional credentials. However, Buss finds much to admire in Ley's positive mentality and embrace of rationalism, leading to a style of modernism that was certainly not disenchanted.

That I don't rate this book a little bit higher is that there are some threads here that could have been further explored by the author, such as implications of Ley cutting off John W. Campbell's "Astounding" to work exclusively for Fred Pohl's "Galaxy," and whether that said something about Campbell's turn to pseudo-science (which Ley despised in general). ( )