“Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon”, by Craig Nelson

 

416 pages, Viking, ISBN-13: 978-0670021031

I, for one, have nothing against chain bookstores: I shop Barnes & Noble all the time, 2^nd & Charles is one of my go-to stops and I still shed a tear or two whenever I think of Borders, but I will forever have a soft spot for small time, independent bookstores, like Bring Your Old Books on Van Dyke Avenue in suburban Shelby Township, MI, which is where I found Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon by Craig Nelson for $1 – because this particular copy is beat all to hell, with the pages coming away from the spine and some even falling out of the same. But, hey, a book for a buck, even a beat-up book, is still a bargain where I come from, so what the hell.

So, anyway, what to make of Rocket Men? As a technical tour-de-force, this ain’t it, for the hows and whys of rocket science are little discussed by Nelson (for that, I would suggest A Man on the Moon: One Giant Leap/The Odyssey Continues/Lunar Explorers by Andrew Chaikin, reviewed on December 9^th, 2021). No, the author’s chief concerns are the Men behind the Rockets: the engineers, scientists, designers and, especially, the astronauts are what interests Nelson as he brings these sometimes forgotten and often misunderstood men to life. And in 1969 to boot, when our nation was painfully divided, the Apollo 11 mission was probably the one achievement that could unite Americans of all stripes in pride. Looking back at the past four decades, has America done anything else to warrant the same swell of love and gratification from all bands of the political spectrum? I think not.

At its worst, Rocket Men can descend into nothing more than a boring collection of quotes from the protagonists, famous and no (even a gas station attendant is quoted at one point). But, if you power through these sometimes deadening sections, Nelson shows us just how heroic these pioneers of space exploration truly were; before I read this book I had little inclination of the tremendous human dramas that underlay this epic (American) achievement, but Nelson tells the tales of both the scientists and the astronauts of Apollo 11 in realistic (yet romantic) detail that filled me with long overdue admiration and gratitude.