I guess I should not be surprised with the number of books out there on the 40th anniversary of our landing a man on the Moon. Its a feat yet to be equaled by any other nation, and certainly a high point to a decade that saw the assassination of President, as well as his brother, the shooting of Martin Luther King, and the slow erosion of American influence as we slogged through Vietnam. But what a way to exit the 1960s!One of these books is Craig Nelson's Rocket Men. His story about Apollo 11 is getting some great reviews. Here is how Fred Bortz describes it in The Dallas Morning News:
The book is divided into three parts. Part I introduces the astronauts, their families and the Apollo launch and mission control teams. Part II presents a distinctive view of NASA’s evolution from its origin to the day of that momentous launch. Part III picks up after Apollo 11’s liftoff and continues to the moon and beyond. It closes with a poignant and thought-provoking discussion of the biggest question faced by the astronauts and agency alike: What do you do after you’ve been to the moon?
Nelson faced his own daunting mission in telling the Apollo story in a fresh way. He rises to the occasion with meticulous research, skillful storytelling rich in detail and a narrative as stimulating and disciplined as Apollo 11’s trajectory through space and history.
For example, the book’s lengthy but exquisitely controlled opening sentence puts readers on the scene on May 20, 1969, as the 30-story-tall Saturn V rocket “was painstakingly trundled five miles across the raging heat and searing green of central Florida’s eastern coast by an eleven-man Kennedy Space Center crew aboard the world’s largest land vehicle, a six-million-pound, tank-wheeled crawler out of NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building, itself so massive that … clouds would form under its 525-foot ceiling … and it would rain.”
To introduce Part II, Nelson writes: “The standard version of the history of NASA has always been that, alarmed and deflated by Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, the United States created a wholly civilian agency that, through the vital legacy of its youngest president, won the space race ‘in peace for all mankind.’ Besides the fact that almost all these assertions are either misleading or expressly false … [t]he actual story is much richer and the achievements more profound.”
Part III is full of heart-pounding detail that reaches its peak as Armstrong searches for a boulder-free area when unknown lunar mass concentrations cause Eagle to overshoot its planned landing spot. Nelson begins by putting the oral history in context. “From a height of two thousand feet while traveling twenty feet per second, Armstrong tried to orient himself to the landscape below from his studies of the Apollo 10 photographs, but Eagle was now too low to the ground, and too far off-course,” he writes. Then he leaves the rest of the story to flight director Gene Kranz, Buzz Aldrin, Armstrong and Armstrong’s wife, Jan.
Whether or not we need to go back to the Moon is its own question, but the fact that we made it there at all is a marvel and a turning point in human history.
