Big books can hide a lot of wasted words! This one by veteran space journalist David Whitehouse does neither. Trained as an astrophysicist at Jodrell Bank, the author brings a direct and personal experience of the space programme, a close-up commentary written with the easy style of a conversational dialogue as though musing over snippets recalled with a friend. And because of that it is a very easy page-turner. Based around a lifetime of gathering stories, many told directly to the author, this single volume tells a lot about the people of Apollo, both managers and astronauts, and also about the entire space programme surrounding lunar exploration. Fortunately, Whitehouse avoids trying to explain the technology and the operational detail; those have been covered elsewhere. But it does provide an almost unique access to potted biographies of key players written in a chatty "I was there" approach which is both endearing and apposite - since, as David points out, only 20% of the worlds current population was alive at the time.
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