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3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Book about the astronauts very much through the eyes of the author, which takes a while to get used to but is comforting by the end of the book.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
I was gripped by this. It’s sparked my interest in something I hadn’t thought much about before. I’m definitely going to get more books on the subject.
Lack of five stars because it gets a bit dreamy sometimes. Slightly too autobiographical and lengthy. But I get it. Context is important for these interviews. Also, the book’s narrow type face made reading feel like harder work than it needed to be.
This book made me feel like an insider. It felt as if I was being allowed behind a curtain. Really glad I found it.
Lack of five stars because it gets a bit dreamy sometimes. Slightly too autobiographical and lengthy. But I get it. Context is important for these interviews. Also, the book’s narrow type face made reading feel like harder work than it needed to be.
This book made me feel like an insider. It felt as if I was being allowed behind a curtain. Really glad I found it.
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
This is an unusually engaging piece– less a set of interviews with ex-astronauts and more an examination of the cultural moment (and its implications) which brought humans to the moon. "What did it really feel like, to walk on the moon?" becomes "What did it mean for us to be people who believed in something as crazy as putting humans on another rock than our Earth?" Delightful, thoughtful.
adventurous
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
http://nhw.livejournal.com/647774.html[return][return]Moondust is superb. Smith tells the story of his efforts to track down the nine living men who have walked on the moon, presenting it as a chronological narrative, one by one, with contributory material from other interested parties (Reg Turnhill, Richard Gordon, Bill the dentist in Carson City, Charles Duke's wife Dotty, etc). But he integrates also reflections on how it seemed at the time, what was going on in politics, how the Apollo program affected and was affected by the popular culture of the day.[return][return]He gets much more from the five surviving LM pilots than from the four surviving commanders. Alan Bean in particular comes across as the kind of guy you would like to know. Buzz Aldrin, given a chance to tell his side of the story, seems much more human than in Hansen's biography of Armstrong. Armstrong himself proves elusive - two conversations at conferences, followed by a series of email exchanges. The most elusive of all is the disgraced David Scott, in hiding not so much because of the decades old "stamps affair" but because of his fling with British newsreader Anna Ford (which I had completely forgotten about).[return][return]I guess I found the book particularly appealing because Smith reflects several times that he is about the same age as the astronauts were when they carried out the moon landings. He is four years older than me, and wrote most of the book three to four years ago, so I felt a particular connection with him, and with them, while reading it. But I think it is written well enough to appeal even to people who are not approaching or just past their fortieth birthdays.[return][return]It would have been nice to have had some photographs, but Smith's visual descriptions are so evocative that perhaps it's not necessary, and anyway there is no shortage of pictures of the relevant individuals on the Web. An excellent book.
Gave up on this book. It didn’t pull me in. I grew up wanting to be an astronaut. I worked in aerospace. I found this book a drag. Sorry for the efforts you’ve put into this book. Lots of people seem to love it.