Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

Ignore the one stars, this is a wonderfully weird and rambling book, part history part personal memoir and travelogue; part social commentary and part political commentary. The portraits of the astronauts are amazingly well painted and Smith allows them speak and explain themselves without too much editorial interference. If you're looking for backroom tales, technical details and the history's behind the multitude of unsung figures who worked within the American space programme then you'll find them here, to quote Mr Smith 'in spades.' If you are from a generation that feels an aching sorrow of being born at the end of what was quite obviously a mini renascence but were too young to appreciate it, then you'll find some comforting words in here. As I've said before, ignore the one stars, this is a unique and wonderfully weird monster of a book.

This particular book does a great job of getting into the insights of the astronauts when they were front page news. Apollo was truly the pinnacle of NASA and Andrew Smith does a great job of creating the aura that still surrounds the 9 men still living, that walked on another world. I could've done without some of his personal musings, as he paints a picture that you would rather he keep to himself. I have my own personal perspectives and if you didn't grow up in U.K. or CA, you'll probably agree that Andrew should've kept some of his memories out of the pages. Even with the author's anecdotes, the book is 5 stars and worthy reading for any space history buff.

Andrew Smith has pulled off a rare writing feat - he's got several books in one that combine into a unified whole. Firstly, this is a book about the nine still-living Apollo astronauts and what they are doing and thinking today. Viewed from thirty years away from their missions, these men's thoughts and ideas are enlightening, funny, weird, infuriating, and ultimately human. But this is also a book about what it was like to be a kid in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the moonshots were happening. Because Smith is a Brit who lived in the US at the time, we also end up with a partly international look at America's space odyssey. What became most interesting to me however, was Smith's search for "the truth" about Apollo. Alert readers with an open mind will follow Smith through a year of his life and countless meetings with astronauts and their family members, conspiracy theorists, and NASA types, all as he continually ponders aloud for us what he himself is thinking. I particularly liked how Smith used his fleeting encounters with first man Neil Armstrong as a metaphor for how his personal reflections about Apollo changed throughout his year on the road-what great writing. Moondust is a remarkable book. I read at least a book a week (I'm also an author), and Moondust is probably the best book I've read in two years. Really! However, if you are a techno weenie looking for minutia on Apollo, do yourself the favor and don't read this book. And if you are an Apollo technical buff and you do read it, please don't write a whiney review lamenting the technical details. This is not a technical book and it is not for you. I originally picked this book up because like many people my age, I was transfixed by Apollo as a kid (I was nine years old when Apollo 11 went up). I also happen to share a name with Apollo 15 moonwalker David Scott which in elementary school was a weird sort of fame. (I remember watching with my classmates at an assembly when the helicopter was picking up Scott after splashdown and he was dunked in the water. The TV announcer said "it looks like David Scott got wet" which provided all sorts of hilarity for weeks among my peers.) But like Smith, Apollo had kind of faded into memory as an almost surreal set of events for me. That he spent a year not only searching out what the moonmen themselves thought but also what HE thought, made Moondust remarkable for me. Thank you Andrew Smith for writing this.

Having been a impressionable young child when the moonlandings occured; I, like so many others, have read just about every available book on the Apollo program. But none like this. While so many of the books (biographies included) involve the technical aspects of Apollo; very few touch on the emotional chord it stuck with so many of us. This book did all that and more. Andrew Smith began a personal odessey to meet and talk to each of the surviving moonwalkers and in the process found out more about himself (and as I discovered I did as well). One of the more open, refreshing, books I've read on Apollo to date. Thoroughly Enjoyable!

From the very first page I was hooked on the book and Andrew Smith's conversational style. By the end of the book I felt I had gotten to know Mr. Smith and the Apollo astronauts as more than just heroic figures of a mythic event. If someone is looking for the history of the space race, Apollo or how a man walked on the moon, they will not find it here. What Mr. Smith does so well is to give people an insight into the personalities of the men who set foot where no other human has had the chance. The book is also as much an exploration of the men of Apollo as it is the journey and memoir of Mr. Smith to understand how this one era from his childhood effected his life and allows the readers to reflect on their own experience. I was born after the end of the Apollo Mission and I never gave much thought to the men who traveled beyond earth's orbit. So I was somewhat surprised by just how much the I was captivated by the picture Mr. Smith painted of these men and how the experience not only uniquely effected each life and philosophy but also societies perceptions. At the end of the book I was left with an appreciation for all these men and their experience (both on the moon and after) and also the desire to carry on the conversation with them that Mr. Smith began. In the publisher synopsis they state the question "Where do you go after you've been to the Moon?" would prove troubling for the astronauts but I don't think the book is some much about "where" but about "how" - How does it feel to walk on the earth after you've seen it from the moon?