The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling: The Life and Legend of Yuri Gagarin Paperback – January 1, 2013

Jenks is able to make the Soviet culture come alive. And at the same time deliver interesting facts about the space program

Professor Jenks has crafted a well written biography about Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut; but also about the Soviet Union, the Cold War, and the communist world in terms of its society--secretive yet open in its desire to remain secluded from Western eyes and yet bask in the glory of having beaten the "decadent capitalists' to yet another first, after the launch of Sputnik. Gagarin himself is not only chronicled in the biographical sense, but as a representative of Soviet society as well as a Russian too young to have fought in the "Great Patriotic War" who yearned for fame and personal success. The book is eminently readable, all too rare in academic work, and draws the reader into the cloak and dagger world of Cold War politics and the ongoing race between the Superpowers, not only for arms but also achievements. Thus, the famous and not so well known players of this era emerge in this work as human beings, with all the traits that are usually hidden in the black and white drama of East-West postwar tension. This is true of the famous such as Gagarin and Kruschev as well as some not too familiar names in the West, including physicists, the KGB, and the Russian military leadership. All in all a great read and wonderfully informative--a window back into an era that once seemed to loom large and menacing in the world.

"The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling" is a strange title for Andrew L. Jenks' scholarly biography of the first man in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, who orbited the earth once in the spacecraft "Vostok 1" on April 12, 1961. In photographs taken of him both before and after his groundbreaking space flight, a high-wattage smile almost always seemed to adorn Gagarin's open, guileless countenance. But there was a lot more to Gagarin than that. As Dr. Jenks details in this well-written, easy-to-read volume, nothing about Gagarin the man was as simple as it seemed to be.From his birth in a tiny Russian provincial village on March 9, 1934, to his untimely death in an airplane crash on March 27, 1968, the world's first human space traveler lived two lives. There was first the "real" Gagarin, but there was also the other one who constantly and relentlessly honed his public image as the ideal communist in order to realize his ambitions that extended far beyond the poor province in which he grew up. Dr. Jenks shows how Gagarin essentially had two "birthdays"--the first one was in the traditional sense, and the second one was the day of his spaceflight, when he instantly became an adored Soviet folk hero. Gagarin's well-known public story is the "sacred" tale. In this volume, Dr. Jenks peers behind the curtain of official omissions, exaggerations, falsehoods, lies and disinformation, which at least partly was necessitated by the Cold War tensions with the West, to reveal the true tale of Gagarin, the "profane." The work that Dr. Jenks put into discovering the man behind the image is impressive, and he reveals details that have been well-hidden in Soviet archives and in fading memories for more than 50 years. As the complex, fully textured portrait of Gagarin emerges, the reader gains a good feeling for the real man behind the myth. Along the way, the reader also learns a lot about Soviet politics, culture and societal attitudes, especially those that resulted from the horrendous traumatic experiences Soviet citizens endured during the Great Patriotic War (1941-45).Sadly, "The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling" contains very little information--almost none--about Gagarin's orbital mission aboard "Vostok 1." Clearly this is a social science study rather than a technological treatise on spacecraft hardware and operations. Still, considering the transcendent nature of the first manned space flight and the effect it had on Gagarin's public and private personas, I would think his mission would warrant a detailed chapter or so. But perhaps it's best--Dr. Jenks apparently has no grounding in technical subjects. For example, here's how he describes the early U.S. Project Mercury flights: "The Americans planned to beat the Soviets by executing a simpler `hop' into low-earth orbit and then immediately returning to earth." Sub-orbital "hops," as flown by U.S. astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, did not go into "low-earth orbit." They were simply up-and-down ballistic arcs, with no orbiting involved. Also, Dr. Jenks perpetuates an apparently indestructible meme by referring to the "far side" of the moon as the "dark side." These and other technical lapses are minor but disappointing.All things considered, "The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling" is a valuable contribution to the literature of spaceflight. With Gagarin as the exemplar, it addresses the human challenges that space travelers face before and after their missions--things that typical spaceflight books written by and for space geeks usually ignore. It provides an interesting look at some little-known aspects of the life and career of the first man to fly in space.

As a very informative and also entertainingly written account of the very first person to travel into space, I would highly recommend this book. It is a fascinating read, with new and original research within Russia and from Russian-language-only sources, something few other English-language books about this era have done. It's new and original, which makes it so refreshing.Jenks not only gives a great description of Gagarin's life and flight, he also makes a concerted effort to get behind the myths that have grown up since around the man. I learned a lot, and it is a book I will enjoy rereading, I know.

Great book. Recommend seller.

Yuri Gagarin was a colourful, interesting man, who did colourful, interesting things and who lived in colourful, interesting times. Yet, author Jenks manages to deliver a dry, trite, repetitive book. Jenks is an academic, not by a long shot a writer, and it shows. Literally none of the characters have any flesh on their bones, so to speak. In many cases, they don't even appear to have names. (Valentina Goryacheva for one, is more often than not referred to as "Gagarin's wife"; Leonid Brezhnev is "the one who ousted Khrushchev"...) Jenks is very preoccupied with what he calls "the Gagarin myth", the distorted public image of Gagarin, created by Soviet authorities and Gagarin himself. Yet he himself does precious little more than creating yet another very vague, and I suspect equally distorted, image of Gagarin. The search for a good Gagarin biography goes on.