Jeffrey Kluger

Apollo 8 was the first crewed spacecraft to reach the Moon. It was also the first crewed spacecraft to ever leave Earth's orbit. It was a truly amazing feat of intelligence and effort.

This is a very well thought out book; well-researched and well-written. The physical copy of the book has beautiful pictures from the preparations for the mission and the mission itself. And the audiobook has a great narrator.

This author also co-wrote "Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13", which I highly recommend.… (more)

Jeffrey Kluger is the co-author, with astronaut Jim Lovell, of Lost Moon (later renamed Apollo 13, after the movie based on it came out). Here, he returns to cover Lovell's previous mission, Apollo 8. It's a mission that lacks some of the cinematic drama of 13, but it's one that was thrilling in its own right, a remarkable achievement full of historic firsts: the first crewed mission to the moon, our first look at the far side of the moon, humans' first time orbiting another body in space, and the first time anyone was able to see the entire Earth as a tiny blue marble hanging in the darkness and, not incidentally, to snap its picture and bring that image home for the rest of us.

This is a very readable account of the mission, and one that captures some of that thrill... or at least, it did for me, but I am admittedly an easy sell on this stuff. It is perhaps not quite as detailed as one might expect for a book devoted solely to this one mission, but in fact, it covers a lot more ground than just Apollo 8 itself, which doesn't begin until maybe a third of the way through the book, after a thorough biography of mission commander Frank Borman and a discussion of the most relevant of the Gemini and the previous Apollo missions. I'd also say there's considerably more emphasis on the people than on the hardware, keeping things relatively light on the technical details, although when it does come up, all of the scientific and technical stuff is certainly explained clearly enough.

If you're interested in reading about the Apollo program in general, I always recommend Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon first and foremost, and I very much recommend Lost Moon, as well. But it's nice to see the first of the moon shots getting some love, and I'd say even those with even a casual interest in the subject could do much worse than to pick this one up.… (more)