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A review by qalminator
The Man Who Knew The Way to the Moon by Todd Zwillich
4.0
The information presented in this is quite interesting, but superficial enough to make me wonder if I'm really getting the full story. The views presented here as strangely dismissive make me wonder what else was going on behind the scenes. Still, it was fascinating to see that what we think of the "the" way to get to the moon was one of many ideas, and not at all the most prominent until time became a crucial issue.
It was also of interest to me that the original plans for getting to the moon involved building permanent infrastructure to make continued exploration easier to manage. Now that people are discussing going to Mars, people are having similar discussions about balancing time and permanence (and I rather hope they go for permanence this time).
That said, the presentation itself was a bit amateurish in places. Music would fade in and out at odd moments, not always feeling like it fit. In the midst of a speech by JFK, the narrator started reading the words over the JFK recording. Interviews would fade in, starting at low enough volume that I often missed the first few words. Then there were the letter-excerpts. I understand not wanting to read them in full, but the way the snippets were cut together was bizarre and hard to follow. Also, there was a sense that this was put together expecting there to be commercial breaks in between sections, as there was a bizarre amount of repetition of ideas, sometimes even in adjacent paragraphs.
Still, I would count this as one of the better Audible Originals I've picked up (as one of the monthly freebies), taking the tally to:
Good: 2
Mediocre: 1
Bad: 2
(Side note: both of the bad ones were in the thriller genre; the good and mediocre ones were all non-fiction)
It was also of interest to me that the original plans for getting to the moon involved building permanent infrastructure to make continued exploration easier to manage. Now that people are discussing going to Mars, people are having similar discussions about balancing time and permanence (and I rather hope they go for permanence this time).
That said, the presentation itself was a bit amateurish in places. Music would fade in and out at odd moments, not always feeling like it fit. In the midst of a speech by JFK, the narrator started reading the words over the JFK recording. Interviews would fade in, starting at low enough volume that I often missed the first few words. Then there were the letter-excerpts. I understand not wanting to read them in full, but the way the snippets were cut together was bizarre and hard to follow. Also, there was a sense that this was put together expecting there to be commercial breaks in between sections, as there was a bizarre amount of repetition of ideas, sometimes even in adjacent paragraphs.
Still, I would count this as one of the better Audible Originals I've picked up (as one of the monthly freebies), taking the tally to:
Good: 2
Mediocre: 1
Bad: 2
(Side note: both of the bad ones were in the thriller genre; the good and mediocre ones were all non-fiction)