Product Description

The race to the moon was won spectacularly by Apollo 11 on 20 July 1969. When astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their 'giant step' across a ghostly lunar landscape, they were watched by some 600 million people on Earth 250,000 miles away. 'A Man on the Moon' is the definitive account of the heroic Apollo programme: from the tragedy of the fire in Apollo 1 during a simulated launch, through the euphoria of the first moonwalk, to the discoveries made by the first scientist in space aboard Apollo 17. Drawing on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with the astronauts and team, this is the story of the twentieth century's greatest human achievement, minute-by-minute, in the words of those who were there.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45220 in Books
• Published on: 1995-01-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 704 pages

Customer Reviews

Gives real insight into what it was like to be there
First the negative points. This books isn't for the seriously technically-minded (although you do pick up a lot of technical info along the way). And a lot of it - the portraits of the astronaut's lives, the in-house NASA politics and so on - will already be familiar if you've read/seen The Right Stuff or Apollo 13.

Where the book triumphs, magnificently, is in giving a sense of what it was actually like to be on the moon. You come away feeling as if you'd been there with the astronauts. The author's key technique is to tell you what they were thinking, and how they felt, as they were exploring the surface. This lets you imagine how you'd have felt in the same place.

The book did, however, remind me of one reason why the later Apollo missions failed to hold the public's interest (or mine, at least) - the relentless focus on geology. Unfortunately the book's fidelity to its subject means that its later chapters are affected in much the same way. After the 50th (or was it 100th?) description of a rock being picked up, I was thinking "wasn't there *anything* else they could have done up there?", and never wanting to hear the word "basalt" again.

Nevertheless, this is an excellent book, and well worth reading, whether you're a "rookie" or veteran of space exploration literature.

Yes, it's the best Apollo book
The best book about the Apollo missions, even in this basic paperback edition. Chaikin's maitre-d'oeuvre doesn't dwell on the political background nor does it get carried away with astronauts' previous careers. Rather, it gives a detailed account of what happened with each of the manned missions - from launch preparations to splashdown. Giving about fifty pages over to each mission, the author clearly carried out extensive research. The appendices testify to this with a long list of interviewees and forty pages of additional notes which futher explain points made throughout the book.

Detailed to the point of acting as a reference book, this work is very useful to have nearby when reading any of the astronauts' biographies. It is always interesting to cross-check a story with this unemotive account. Don't expect to find much information about the 'other' Apollo activities, though (the tests between Apollos 1 and 7, the ASTP and Skylab). Chaikin concentrates firmly on Apollo 1, then 7 to 17.

There are forty-five or so small but well-chosen and well captioned black and white photographs in the middle pages of the paperback edition.

A great and entertaining read
I really enjoyed this book. It was thorough, and well written. It was also very varied and kept my attention from start to finish. The book starts with chapters dealing with the run up to the first "moonshot" -- Apollo 8. It then covers that mission and each of the subsequent missions that landed on the moon from Apollo 11 to 17 in detail, but without being repetitious. I would have liked to know a bit more about Apollos 9 and 10 which were hardly covered. The author is also (as you would expect) a great fan of space and this means that the (limited) disucssions of the value of the missions do not have the air of balance. But then I didn't buy the book for that, I just wanted to know what happened. And on that front the book delivered all that I could have asked from it.