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Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, March 4, 2002
Award-winning writer Laurence Bergreen was granted unrestricted access to the inner workings of the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter Team, many of whose members have been based at Goddard. In his book, Voyage to Mars: NASA's Search for Life Beyond Earth he chronicles the exhilaration, the setbacks and the triumphs of this team's extraordinary adventure. In this talk, the author will discuss the writing of this book, including his impressions of this team of distinguished Goddard scientists and engineers, as well as a field trip he took in the company of NASA scientist James Garvin to the Mars analogue of Surtsey Island, off the coast of Iceland.
Laurence Bergreen is a prize-winning biographer and journalist. His most recent book is Voyage to Mars: NASA's Search for Life Beyond Earth, a narrative of NASAs exploration of Mars and the search for extraterrestrial life, published in November 2000 by Penguin Putnam; it is also available on tape from HighBridge Audio. NBC television is developing it for a weekly dramatic series. He has written Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life, a comprehensive biography drawing on unpublished manuscripts and exclusive interviews with Armstrong colleagues and friends, Capone: The Man and the Era, and James Agee: A Life. His groundbreaking biography, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin, appeared in 1990. This book won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award. His first book was Look Now, Pay Later: The Rise of Network Broadcasting. He has written for many national publications including Esquire, Newsweek, TV Guide, Details, Prologue, and Military History Quarterly. He has taught at the New School for Social Research and served as Assistant to the President of the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. In 1995, he served as a nonfiction judge for the National Book Awards and in 1991 as a judge for the PEN/Albrand Nonfiction Award. He also serves as a Featured Historian for the History Channel. Mr. Bergreen graduated from Harvard University in 1972. He is a member of PEN American Center and the Authors Guild.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Barbara Pfarr
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