With a new week comes something I haven't tried before: a theme for the week's posts. And given that intellectual-property theft is the sincerest form of productivity, I'm ripping this week's theme off from a series featured on All Things Considered. In this series, a prominent literary figure is asked to list three books on a given theme that he or she thinks are really good. It's a neat idea, and since I know a good idea when I see it, I'm going to spend this week in a five-part ripoff of NPR's neat idea. Isn't it neat having your own blog? Of course it is.
Before we begin, the ground rules: These books are selected by me, and represent my own favorites. I've deliberately chosen only books with which I have firsthand experience, and that I've read all the way through (or read the majority of, enough of to have made a good assessment). My selections, and my themes, are limited by my interests, the books in my library, and my personal predilections, preferences and prejudices. It's an entirely subjective list, and I make no claims that it's unbiased or objective or the bottom line on anything except books that have served me well and that I'd recommend to friends as good reads. So there.
(One more note: I've deliberately avoided installing hyperlinks to these books at any of the online bookstores. My reason? I'd rather you buy them at the bookstore, online or brick-and-mortar, of your own preference. I know I could set up an affiliate account with any of the online bookstores, but it's a bit more of a hassle than I'd like to engage in right now. Anyhow, you should be able to buy most, if not all, of these books from any of the usual suspects, or through searches for used/out-of-print books.)
And now to the first day's list. Given that we're currently observing the 39th anniversary of a particular historic event, I thought I'd launch (tee hee!) this series with three particularly good books about the history of human spaceflight -- in particular, the race to the moon.
Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon caused quite a stir when it came out in 1994 because it was an accessible, thorough, and fun-to-read account of the lunar voyages of Apollo. Chaikin interviewed all the Apollo astronauts he could, including some who were a bit reclusive, and manages to capture not only the great technological advances but also the humanity of the voyagers and those who supported them. If you've seen the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, you've seen a series that was based on Chaikin's book. It's a fun read, well-researched, and it's stood for over a decade as perhaps the best first stop for anyone interested in the subject. (If you can find it, there's also a large-format, three-volume edition with hundreds of color photographs, and it makes a good thing even better.)
While Chaikin's book retells the side of Apollo known by most, Apollo by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox tells the story of the engineering and technical side of Apollo. The astronauts and their voyages are really in the background, for Murray and Cox tell the story of how the machines were designed, how the software was written, how Mission Control came into being, how the flight rules were developed, and so on -- the whole story of the enterprise that made it happen. Lest you think this would make for a dry volume filled with jargon, Murray and Cox write in an engaging style that's filled with illustration and anecdote, making technical concepts accessible to the lay reader. Read Chaikin for the story of the voyages, and read Murray and Cox for the even more amazing backstory. These books complement each other very well.
Finally, Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins is, for my money, the best book ever written by a space explorer -- and given that some of the astronauts' memoirs are very good, that's saying a lot. What's even more remarkable is that Collins' memoir was first published in 1973, and even with the passage of time it's still considered one of the best. The Apollo 11 crew wasn't known for being particularly effervescent or dynamic, but Michael Collins possessed a poet's eye and a sly wit, and he put those to work in recounting his Air Force career and his NASA days in this book. Collins tells the tales of his spacefaring days with amusement, bemusement and an underlying sense of wonder about it all, and the book reads like a neighbor telling you about some of the incredible things he's experienced. He flew to the moon, yes, but you also find that Collins is a man who loved tending his roses and genuinely doesn't understand why people want autographs. ("What do they do with them?" he's been known to ask.)
Honorable mentions: The All-American Boys by Walt Cunningham (an astronaut memoir that told the stories behind the "all-American" image); First Man by James Hansen (an excellent, authorized biography of Neil Armstrong); ...the Heavens and the Earth by James MacDougall (a sweeping history of the Space Age's political backstory); This New Ocean by William E. Burrows (an accessible general overview of human space exploration, providing some great context); Riding Rockets by Mike Mullane (does for the Shuttle program what The All-American Boys did for the previous generation's astronauts); Moon Dust by Andrew Smith (tells the human stories of the Apollo astronauts three decades later); and, of course, The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (need I say more?).
Tomorrow, my picks in books about history.