In a New York Times review of Margaret Lazarus Dean’s “wonderfully evocative new book ‘Leaving Orbit,’” reviewer Michiko Kakutani describes the associate professor of English’s chronicle of “the beauty and the strangeness in the last days of American spaceflight, in the last moments of something that used to be cited as what makes America great” as a “heartfelt paean to, and elegy for, a remarkable collective undertaking. She captures both the science and poetry of NASA’s missions, and the romance of space travel.”