Man on the Moon: Voyages of Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin Book Review

Man on the Moon

A Great Leap of Wonder, Born of Innumerable Tiny Steps

Every page of A Man on the Moon demonstrates both Andrew Chaikin's lifelong love for the Apollo Program and the eight years he spent researching its fine details. At first (and to be honest, second) glance, the book appears not so much closely argued as densely documented, with every incident reconstructed from interviews and mission recordings and then arranged in chronological order -- often with time stamps to further authenticate each event as a tiny, isolated stage in the gigantic process of sending human beings to the moon.

The effect can be daunting and even off-putting at first, but soon Chaikin starts revealing the larger purpose behind the minutia. Once again, the process is gradual and incremental, but by the end of the book, he clearly spells his argument out. All the details are here not so much for their own sake, but because in the aggregate they help to recreate (as closely as possible) the experience of being an Apollo astronaut or rather, interestingly, all of the Apollo astronauts and all the engineers, administrators, and floor technicians who made their flights possible. This is an attempt to tell "the story of the lunar voyages that the astronauts never wrote" from a revolving perspective: drifting from one viewpoint to another with an apparently effortless freedom from gravity, writing the book that it would've taken all of its characters to write.Get full access
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Book Review on Man on the Moon: Voyages of Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin Assignment

Of course, the "book" that the crew and astronauts of the Apollo Program actually "wrote" was the program itself, those flights written in rocket fuel and steel, acceleration and death, blast and silence and wonder. Chaikin acknowledges that his book is only a substitute for the real thing, but given the slow decline of the space program -- his "Epilogue" to Apollo is essentially our lives --… [END OF PREVIEW] . . . READ MORE