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    Moondust
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    Moondust
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    Moondust
    Ebook482 pages7 hours

    Moondust

    By HarperCollins

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “Spellbinding…a provocative meditation on lunar travel and humanity’s relation to space.” — Business Week

    The Apollo lunar missions of the 1960s and 1970s have been called the last optimistic acts of the twentieth century. Twelve astronauts made this greatest of all journeys and were indelibly marked by it, for better or for worse. Journalist Andrew Smith tracks down the nine surviving members of this elite group to find their answers to the question "Where do you go after you've been to the Moon?"

    A thrilling blend of history, reportage, and memoir, Moondust rekindles the hopeful excitement of an incandescent hour in America's past when anything seemed possible as it captures the bittersweet heroism of those who risked everything to hurl themselves out of the known world—and who were never again quite able to accept its familiar bounds.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 5, 2009
    ISBN9780061909085
    Unavailable
    Moondust

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    Reviews for Moondust

    4/5

    174 ratings8 reviews

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    • 2/5
      An interesting premise but too much shifting between analysis of late 60's American Zeitgeist & the space program. Whilst I appreciate a need to keep things in some sort of context this befuddled things for me. Not bad but not what you think
    • 4/5
      An absorbing read, though at times his journalist's style was a little annoying as he struggled to find sometimes over-complicated psychological explanations for some of the Moonwalkers' reticence, when it could more easily be explained as deriving from having suffered previously at the media's hands, or from simple shyness. I am much more positive about the Apollo programme than is Smith, but he argues his case fairly well and his final conclusion is that, marginally, the programme was worthwhile because of what it told us about Earth and ourselves.
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting approach to the Apollo Moon landings as Smith attempts to interview the nine surviving men who walked on the Moon in order to gain some understanding of what it was all about. Today is the fortieth anniversary of the first Moon landing, and this book has helped me find some perspective on all the material floating around in the ether about the space programme. I particularly liked how Andrew Smith mixed in his own recollections of his reactions to the space programme. There are flaws though, the book rambles across the events of the space race leaving the reader with no real sense of the continuity. But the real message of this book is that as much as we may want our heros to be perfect, ultimately they are a very human and each astronaut had a very different perspective and reaction to their experiences in space and on the Moon. I should add that despite all the hype around the Moon walkers, for me, the real heroes are the Command Module pilots, who stayed in space, spending 47 minutes of each 2 hour Moon orbit in complete isolation, 'a darkness and aloneness you could feel' and facing the prospect that the Lunar Module may not be able to free itself from the Moon's surface, as Michael Collins, the Command Module pilot for Apollo 11, says 'My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to earth alone .. I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life and I know it.'
    • 4/5
      The first chapter on landing what was not much more than a tin can on the moon is spellbinding
    • 1/5
      The Richard & Judy sticker on the front cover should have indicated this was an easy book. However, it was anything but. The prose is simple enough, but the story turns out to be a lot more boring than it should, as do the astronauts themselves. It was disappointing to note than almost all of the astronauts appeared to find something bordering on the divine after their return - especially when considering they were men more of science than religion. All in all, a turgid and disappointing read.
    • 3/5
      I slogged doggedly through this, determined to finish my first book of 2006 – on the 18th February! I wander bookshops these days wondering if I’ll find anything that takes my fancy, while many books at home sit on the shelf gathering dust.Moondust, potentially damned or praised by the “Richard and Judy’s Book Club” sticker on the front of the cover, was enjoyable but also hard work. Tracking down the surviving astronauts who actually stepped foot on the moon finds most of them dull in comparison to their experience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many can’t put their adventure into words that mean much to the rest of us, and the author struggles to get to grips with why it matters to him. He reaches the conclusion that the Apollo adventure shone new light on the way we lived at the time, and continues to reflect back upon us. In a way, returning to the moon is a bigger dream now than the reality of many of the journeys that were taken, and the book is a lament to that fact.
    • 4/5
      This is really two books: A collective where-are-they-now biography of the nine (out of twelve) surviving moonwalkers, and Smith's reflections on what the space program meant to America then and what it means now. The two are intertwined, as Smith uses his interviews with the astronauts as a springboard for his own reflections. The biographical material is consistently superb, and Smith's observation that lunar-module pilots were more changed by the experience of being on the moon than mission commanders were is brilliant (and true). The cultural reflection was less satisfying for me, in part because Smith (for all that he was wowed by the lunar landings) doesn't seem to understand that, for a lot of people (including some of his interviewees and a large segment of his readership) space travel is not part of the past, but an ongoing enterprise. Still, this is a superb book, and well worth reading for anyone interested in the history of the Apollo program.
    • 3/5
      I read this immediately after Andrew Chaikin's definitive account of the Apollo missions. This is by a journalist who sets out to interview the remaining moonwalkers whilst they are still with us. So it makes for a nice up-to-date supplement to the Chaikin. Colloquial, conversational and witty including (almost inevitably) the subjective impressions the moon landing made on the author as a child. An easy read.