Man on the Moon a Book Review

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"Until someone follows in their still-preserved footsteps," he writes, "we are left to make the journey in our imaginations. It is a journey we [emphasis mine] can make."

Beyond all the archival detail, this is the story Chaikin knows he really needs to tell: the imaginary journey, the courage that the Kennedy generation had to undertake a great deed, transcend its own technological limitations, and explore a previously impossible frontier. The facts are what got the astronauts to the moon alive; every smallest aspect of every mission was checked and rechecked with greater care than Chaikin checks his own interview transcripts. They need to be preserved so future generations can see how it was done. But he keeps coming back to the "wonder" that the facts made possible -- the thesis that all the evidence and sources of eight years of work, endless interviews, appendices, notes support.

This is the wonder of the author as a thirteen-year-old boy ("the golden age of science fiction," someone once said) keeping a vigil in front of the television, collecting models and maps, trying to hang onto the experience and to recollect it more fully by rehearsing the details over and over. To be that boy again, dreaming of being an astronaut.

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And, ideally, to share the experience of being that boy in an age where Americans were walking on the moon and the future seemed expansive and filled with possibilities. To put us all into a "flight simulator" of sorts, let us try on the flight suit, pick up where Apollo left off. Needless to say, I thought the book was both inspirational and, in the light of day, profoundly nostalgic. If our past is Chaikin's "Epilogue" to the human adventure, where are we today? And where do we want to go from here?.....

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