Excellent history of the innovation and sacrifices it took to get us to the moon. Highly recommend. ( )

Just wonderful! I'm sorry it's over - I'll have to listen again!

Donovan does an excellent job telling the full story of the US space program from before Mercury through the landing of Apollo 11. As someone who lived through that period, this book was an excellent recounting of the heroic men and women who put Neil and Buzz on the moon.

I can't recommend this too much - don't miss this! ( )

Rated: A
It's hard for me to disassociate the quality of the writing vs. the quality of the tale. My parents were part of the first generation to see the other side of the clouds. My generation became the first to land on the moon and return. It continues to be an amazing journey well told by the author. ( )

What were the dangers and challenges of the Apollo 11 mission? Were they different from those of the Mercury and Gemini missions that defined America’s first steps away from their home planet?

Combining in-depth research with new interviews, the author offers an overview of the American space program, including the historic Apollo 11 mission to the moon. A wide selection of well-chosen photographs accompanies the narrative; extensive notes and bibliographic information follow the text.

Although eminently readable and notably enthusiastic, similar narratives have included most of the information related here. Unfortunately, several inconsistencies and errors both with quotations and with recounting of events, while seemingly insignificant in the overall picture of the space program, are certain to be a stumbling block for readers who grew up reading about the space program in the daily newspaper and watching Walter Cronkite’s space reports on the evening news.

Recommended. ( )

I'm that person who devours any book written about the space program. When I saw this, I had to have it.

Going into this, I thought that the bulk of the book was going to focus on Apollo 11. There have been multiple books written about single missions, and they’ve been very good (Apollo 8, Apollo 13). I didn’t realize that this book was going to give you an almost complete history of the space age. I thought it odd that a book that was supposed to focus on Apollo 11 doesn’t really start focusing on that mission until page 300. Is it really the extraordinary story of Apollo 11 when it only takes 95-ish pages? I didn’t find the sections leading up to Apollo 11 to be bad at all, I just wasn’t expecting them. The author writes well and likes to sprinkle his narrative with unattributed anecdotes. I didn’t mind this so much, until one of them directly contradicted established history.

Page 220 recounts a story, apparently taken from an interview with Chuck Friedlander, where he takes Grissom’s parents to Cape Canaveral: “A few months before the Apollo 204 fire, Grissom’s parents had come up from Indiana to visit. Gus asked Chuck Friedlander to give them a tour of Cape Kennedy. . . Friedlander took Gus’s parents up the elevator to level eight and walked them over to the command module.” The gist of this story is that Grissom’s parents visited the capsule high atop Launch Complex 34 a few months before the launch. This would not have happened. The capsule was not installed at LC-34 until January 3, 1967, which is only 24 days before the fire. Hardly a “few months” before the fire. The Apollo 1 capsule arrived at KSC in August of 1966, and spent time in the attitude chamber and then an altitude chamber before arriving at LC-34. I’m not doubting that Grissom’s parent may have toured the Cape with Mr. Friedman, but I suggest that if they did visit the capsule, it would not have been at level 8, on the gantry at LC-34.

I’m also quite annoyed with the author for misquoting Grissom’s last few statements before the fire. On page 214, the author lists Grissom as saying "I said, Jesus Christ, if we can't communicate across three miles, how the hell are we going to communicate when we're on the moon."

Here is what he really said: "How are we going to get to the moon if we can't talk between 3 buildings? Jesus Christ. I said how are we gonna get to the moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?"

It may not seem like a big difference, but it is different. Transcripts of the audio (or the audio itself) can be found online. I think there was no reason for the author to misquote Grissom here. It may seem close enough, but imagine if we only remembered the close enough version other iconic statements. This may seem like nitpicking, but I’m very touchy about Apollo 1. There was no excuse for this in a situation where the author had some really awesome resources at his disposal while writing this book.

In the end, I was disappointed. Finding inaccuracies like these make me suspicious about errors I may not have noticed. I appreciate that the author wanted to write about the space program, but I’ve honestly read this same book a dozen times. It has been done before. Even though Apollo 11 has been covered before, I think that a fresh version for the 50th anniversary would have been great. I don't think this quite fits the bill. I’m not going to discourage anyone from reading the book, but I think there are better examples already out there. But who am I to disagree with Michael Collins? ( )