The Apollo lunar flights are arguably the greatest adventure in human history. Here astronauts who have traveled to the moon describe their experiences. Quotes from interviews with twenty-three Apollo astronauts create a unique account of their lunar experiences and shape a spectacular narrative that speaks to the entire arc of the lunar journey.

Alongside the text are more than one hundred sixty breathtaking rare images from NASA’s high-resolution scans of the photos these explorers took during each of the missions. The book offers readers an extraordinary first-person chronicle of their lunar adventures.

Highly recommended. ( )

Great photos and the words of the astronauts are inspiring and fascinating. ( )

Space journalist Andrew Chaikin conducted extensive interviews with the Apollo astronauts in (I believe) the 80s and early 90s. In this book, he collects snippets of those interviews, along with high-quality photographs from various Apollo missions. I find these snippets fascinating and remarkable, because they feature the astronauts opening up in a very candid and (if I may use the phrase) down-to-Earth kind of way, a way that cuts through the often difficult expectations that people have of them to reveal something of what it was like to just be a guy doing a job, when that job involved going to the moon. (An example that gives you something of the flavor of the book: Alan Bean talking about what it was like for him to lift off from the moon, knowing that he was leaving an extraordinary place after an extraordinary mission and that it would probably be a very long time before anyone ever came back to that particular spot. There are things, he says, that people expect you to say about that, and he is capable of saying them, but what he was really thinking at that moment was that he hoped none of the little bits of foil that were falling off the lander would land on the science experiments he'd so carefully set up and mess them up.)

As someone with a deep and abiding fascination for this period of space history, someone who loves hearing the inspirational phrases but is even more interested in the unvarnished reality of it all, this book was utterly and completely up my alley, and I am delighted that it exits.

I should also add that I recommend Chaikin's history of the Apollo program A Man on the Moon very highly. Voices from the Moon may be interesting mainly to my fellow obsessive space nerds, but that one is a must-read for anybody with any interest in the subject at all. ( )