Chasing the Moon

This expansion of a six-hour PBS series premiering in July 2019 offers in-depth portraits of the many characters involved in the race to the moon.

April 1, 2019
In an informative companion book to the PBS miniseries of the same name, documentary filmmaker Stone, the program's writer, producer, and director, and Andres, a consulting producer and researcher on the series, chronicle the quest for space travel that culminated in Neil Armstrong's first step on the lunar surface. As the authors reveal, the journey to the moon did not begin with John F. Kennedy's commitment to a moon landing by the end of the 1960s but more than half a century earlier, in "agrarian czarist Russia," where "a popular spiritual philosophy called cosmism" posited space travel as "the ultimate liberation" from "the shackles of Earth's gravity" and into a realm where "all humanity would partake in cosmic immortality." In the decades that followed, space travel piqued the public's imagination: Science fiction magazines, novels, and movies found an eager audience, and interplanetary societies began in America and the U.K. By 1950, Arthur C. Clarke became a popular spokesman for, and writer about, interplanetary flight, so well-known that in 1964, when director Stanley Kubrick planned "an ambitious, optimistic epic about humanity's destiny in space," he called on Clarke as a collaborator; 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, to great acclaim, a few years later. The authors profile other major figures who influenced America's space program throughout the 1950s and '60s: charismatic German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun and his mentor Willy Ley, who became part of "America's new German brain trust"; NASA head James Webb, who advocated for government support even in the face of skeptical congressmen; newscaster Edward R. Murrow, who repeatedly pressed for integrating the astronaut corps; Poppy Northcutt, the first female flight controller; and the teams of astronauts who manned the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo crews. The authors re-create in breathtaking detail the launch of Apollo 11 and Armstrong's calm announcement four days later: "The Eagle has landed." A brisk narrative, deft anecdotes, and abundant illustrations enliven a well-researched history.

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April 8, 2019
In this companion volume to a PBS documentary series, Stone and Andres, respectively the series’ director and consulting producer, effectively if unspectacularly recount the path to the first moon landing. They do so through the perspectives of key participants and observers, including sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and NASA head James Webb. Clarke became fascinated with space exploration, for which he became an early proponent, as a teenager after spotting the “vibrant purple dusk jacket” of the book The Conquest of Space in a shop window in the 1930s. At age 18, Von Braun was already involved in rocketry experiments, going on to work for both the Nazi and U.S. governments. Webb’s involvement didn’t go back as far—he’d been a Washington insider and oil company executive before being appointed to run NASA—but once there “proved no less a space visionary.” The authors’ prose can be hyperbolic—they improbably claim that the “brown gulls swooping” over Cape Canaveral on July 19, 1969, “sensed the day was anything but typical”—but overall, this is a solid popular history that personalizes the race for the moon through the stories of some fascinating people. Agent: Jane von Mehren, Aevitas.

May 15, 2019
Written as a companion volume to a six-hour American Experience miniseries airing on PBS in July 2019, this sweeping history from series director Stone and producer Andres celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing by profiling many of the key figures who helped America win the space race. Arthur C. Clarke, the late science-fiction writer who cowrote the screenplay for 2001, inspired early space researchers with his 1945 paper envisioning orbiting communications satellites. Former Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun spearheaded the design of the Saturn V rockets that propelled the space capsules beyond Earth's gravity. Frances Poppy Northcutt broke ground at NASA as the first woman in Mission Control. In addition to copious photographs and newly discovered archival material, the authors include a generous slice of Cold War political history and some surprising anecdotes, such as the revelation that JFK ridiculed space travel only a year before his seminal 1961 man on the moon speech. An absorbing and distinctive contribution to the current profusion of moon-landing books.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)