[In the following review, Kendrew praises Fallaci's If the Sun Dies as "one of very few pioneer works in a new genre."]

The knowing publishers have placed on the dust jacket of this book [If the Sun Dies] a full-page photograph of its young Florentine author, curled barefoot in a chair with her long blonde hair loosened. This is the lady who visits NASA, in Houston and Los Angeles and Cape Kennedy and Huntsville and White Sands, who confronts astronauts and Ray Bradbury, public-relations men and motel keepers with her memories of vineyard and basilica, her literary values and her human charm. She asks these people "Why?" and "Who are you?" She tells the story with hot candor and a sharp eye, out of a remarkable experience of life.

The book, in rushing and poetic prose, turned into flowing colloquial English by Pamela Swinglehurst, takes the form of long reflective letters to a distant father—off there in a villa in Chianti, a Tuscan country gentleman who was something of a hero in the Resistance. The war and the Nazi terror are strong in the book. Wernher von Braun (Doctor von Braun, the public-relationsman insists weakly throughout the colloquy) is portrayed: likable, forceful, versatile, extraordinary, dominant. But over the whole of this expansive interview the scent of lemon hangs like the memories of Proust's childhood. Then she recalls. The German soldiers with the tommy guns who broke the door down to find and deport the two partisans she had just hidden in the well carried the same scent: German soap. "'The future is always interesting,' said von Braun. 'More than the past,' said I."

She met a dozen or two of the astronauts. They come off not badly. To be sure, she finds most of them venerable, dull, bored, bald, mechanical. A few—she was fortunate—are different. She found a poet and a philosopher, and a few others who knew what wit and doubt and fancy mean. One day while driving with the astronauts' physician she invented a Project Cheese, which proposed to subvert Apollo to mine the moon, to sell the cheese here at great profit, working all the while on the other side of the moon to evade discovery. The rumor spread to all the astronauts, and a few of them understood.

And so this woman, a partisan at 14, an incredulous European witness of the vulgarity of Highway 66, of our motels and our extortionate economy, comes in the end not to bury Apollo but somehow to praise it. "And if the Earth dies, and if the Sun dies, we shall live up there, Father. Cost what it may: a tree, a billion trees, all the trees that life has given us."

No capsule review can exhaust the manysidedness and perceptivity and eccentricities of this book. It is one of very few pioneer works in a new genre: the criticism of science and technology as ways of life, as sets of values. It is not exposition of events or good reporting or philosophical analysis. It is quick and imperfect, but it is breathing with life.