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Bettie's Books

A Stuga On the Cusp of the Orust Riviera, tucked away next to a hobbit hole in the woods.

Konstantin - Tom Bullough Fictionalised BiographyA paperback with a dustcover - Neat!Dedication: For EdwynFront Quote:The greater man's progress,the more he replacesthe naturalby what is artificialKonstantin TsiolkovskyDreams of Earth and Sky(1895)Opening: December 1867Kostya hurried down the bank towards the frozen Oka, fine and light in his heavy sheepskin coat as a sparrow in its winter plumage.A fictionalised biography of the man who first thought of space travel.Verst: A verst (Russian: верста, versta) is an obsolete Russian unit of length. It is defined as being 500 sazhen long, which makes a verst equal to 1.0668 kilometres RyazanFrom wiki: Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (17 September [O.S. 5 September] 1857 – 19 September 1935) was an Imperial Russian and Soviet rocket scientist and pioneer of the astronautic theory. Along with his followers, the German Hermann Oberth and the American Robert H. Goddard, he is considered to be one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics. His works later inspired leading Soviet rocket engineers such as Sergey Korolyov and Valentin Glushko and contributed to the success of the Soviet space program.Tsiolkovsky spent most of his life in a log house on the outskirts of Kaluga, about 200 km (120 mi) southwest of Moscow. A recluse by nature, he appeared strange and bizarre to his fellow townsfolk.WORRY NOT - you can skip the mathematical equations as they are not needed to enjoy this book.This was rather a limp-wristed attempt to tell a very interesting story - so many sleeping policeman when all I wanted was information. Still, I have come away knowing far more about the father of rocketry than I did purely because this book made me look at online sources for something concrete.