Ignition!

"Ignition! is a history of liquid rocket propellants, but it's also a history of cold war and the space race, told from a particular point of view....That humor helps the accessibility, and as long as you remember some high school chemistry you shouldn't have a problem with the science either."- Ars Technica
"This insider's account of the early years of rocketry captures the excitement of researching and developing technologies that lie outside the realm of computer science. While we're accustomed to think of technological progress in terms of Moore's law, in a few short years these engineers went from launching metal tubes small enough to hold in your hand to propelling a two ton metal capsule containing three humans all the way to the moon."- Inc., 9 Powerful Books Elon Musk Recommends
"A good book on rocket stuff...that's a really fun one." - Elon Musk
"Ignition! is a hard-to-get-your-hands-on account of early rocket science...Clark was an American chemist active in the development of rocket fuels back in the 1960s and 1970s, and the book is both an account of the growth of the field and an explainer of how the science works."
- Business Insider
"Read this book. You'll find plenty about John and all the other sky-high crackpots who were in the field with him and you may even get (as I did) a glimpse of the heroic excitement that seemed to make it reasonable to cuddle with death every waking moment-to say nothing of learning a heck of a lot about the way in which the business of science is really conducted." - Issac Asimov, from the foreword
"Ignition!, originally written in 1972, is back in print after a long hiatus. A classic book, it tells a rollicking story of an era when space was the frontier. An informative history, it reads like an adventure story."- Galveston County Daily News