Just finished Dirty Little Secrets and Red Star in Orbit today. Lost of time on my hands without a home internet connection.
Dirty Little Secrets was a horrible horrible book that I don't recommend to anyone. I only finished it out of a sense of follow-through that I have, and an obsessive personality. It was a stupid series of articles about military secrets that are available openly, and only relevant to pimple-faced circle-jerking military enthusiasts.
Red Star in Orbit was a fairly good, if overtly jingoistic book about the Soviet side of the space race. The friend who lent it to me worked for NASA around the time of the Challenger Disaster, and we got into a few discussions as to who really won the space race. Up to now, I never really appreciated how well propaganda worked because I really did think the Soviets did everything first, and there never really intended to go to the moon.
It was written in a time period before the Mir, the shuttle disaster, and the fall of Communism,after all the major space feats, but before space became irrelevant to most Americans. It was interesting, but not engrossing.