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Moondust

In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

Audiobook
3 of 3 copies available
3 of 3 copies available

In time for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing comes this edition of journalist Andrew Smith's book, now updated with a new Afterword, that tells the fascinating story of twelve astronauts who ventured to space, and his interviews with nine of the surviving men.

"Smith's book succeeds...because he bungee-cords together so many intriguing digressions."—New York Times

The Apollo lunar missions of the 1960s and 1970s have been called the last optimistic acts of the twentieth century. Twelve astronauts made this greatest of all journeys and were indelibly marked by it, for better or for worse. Journalist Andrew Smith tracks down the nine surviving members of this elite group to find their answers to the question ""Where do you go after you've been to the Moon?""

A thrilling blend of history, reportage, and memoir, Moondust rekindles the hopeful excitement of an incandescent hour in America's past when anything seemed possible as it captures the bittersweet heroism of those who risked everything to hurl themselves out of the known world—and who were never again quite able to accept its familiar bounds.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 13, 2005
      Between 1969 and 1972, 12 men traveled a quarter-million miles to the moon and returned safely. In this powerful, intimate story, journalist Smith sets out to find these men and discover how that experience changed their lives. Smith, a boy living in a nondescript California subdivision at the time of the Apollo missions and caught up in the endless possibility of space flight, journeys to the halls of power in Washington, D.C., and the backwoods of Texas in search of these mythical figures of American know-how. He finds Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, still cool and confident, a plainspoken man who never let on how close that mission came to disaster. In Gene Cernan, the last man on the Moon, he finds an imperious, driven, highly successful businessman. If all of the men share one affliction, it's fame. Once at the center of the world's attention, these mostly ordinary men with some extraordinary gifts and luck have lived their lives being asked the same question—What was it like "up there"? In an artful blend of memoir and popular history, Smith makes flesh-and-blood people out of icons and reveals the tenderness of his own heart. Agent, Emma Parry.

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  • English

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