April 12, 2011 is the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering journey into space. To commemorate this momentous achievement, Springer-Praxis is producing a mini series of books that reveals how humanity’s knowledge of flying, working, and living in space has grown in the last half century.

“Tragedy and Triumph” focuses on the 1980s and early 1990s, a time when relations between the United States and the Soviet Union swung like a pendulum between harmony and outright hostility. The glorious achievements of the shuttle were violently arrested by the devastating loss of Challenger in 1986, while the Soviet program appeared to prosper with the last Salyut and the next-generation Mir orbital station. This book explores the continued rivalry between the two superpowers during this period, with each attempting to outdo the other – the Americans keen to build a space station, the Soviets keen to build a space shuttle – and places their efforts in the context of a bitterly divisive decade, which ultimately led them into partnership.

From the reviews:

“This large volume takes readers to the early 1990s. Evans provides very good details of people and events, but places much less emphasis on science, engineering, and space technology. The author’s intent was to emphasize the human and personal side of the many aspects of space exploration--not only of the Americans, but also of the Soviets and others. … Summing Up: Recommended. All academic, professional, and general space history collections.” (A. M. Strauss, Choice, Vol. 50 (5), January, 2013)

Ben Evans is an accomplished and experienced space writer ideally qualified to chronicle the epic story of human space exploration. In addition to writing five books for Springer/Praxis, including the first book in this series: Escaping the Bonds of Earth: The Fifties and Sixties (2009), Foothold in the Heavens – The Seventies (2010), and the most recent At Home in Space (2011). He has published numerous space and astronomy related articles in such journals as Spaceflight, Countdown, and Astronomy Now.