New and Recently Read Books About Lost Spacefarers
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Striking images from the (left) Onizuka book and (right) Armstrong book
Recently, a number of books about astronauts have been published after the spacefarer in question passed away. As someone who edited the memoirs of Apollo 7 astronaut Donn Eisele, and finished two books with Apollo 15's Al Worden right before he died, I can relate to the inherent difficulties. Below are my reviews of some of these books.
A Long Voyage to the Moon: The Life of Naval Aviator and Apollo 17 Astronaut Ron Evans, Geoffrey Bowman, 2021.
A decade ago I was fortunate enough to write a book with Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden, who orbited the moon in 1971 and did the first ever deep space EVA. Astronaut Ron Evans, the following year, had a near-identical assignment for the final Apollo mission to the moon, Apollo 17. This new book chronicles his life and moon mission in exceptional detail. The difference is, Evans died 32 years ago, leaving author Geoffrey Bowman without the firsthand access I’d enjoyed with Al Worden.
It’s therefore all the more remarkable that Bowman has assembled this fascinating biography. Evans was by all accounts here an affable, friendly fellow, and such a likeable personality can sometimes make for a bland book. But with the deeply involved assistance of Evans’ widow, Jan, the moon voyager comes to life in these pages. Some books about engineering marvels miss the humanity. This book, however, is all heart.
Bowman is particularly good, I thought, on showing the flow of one career – military aviator – into another, that of astronaut, set against the specter of the Vietnam War, and leading to a beautiful description of humankind’s furthest explorations to date. The Apollo 17 mission has been much written about before, but it has generally been from the point of view of the astronauts who explored the surface. By shifting perspective to Evans in lunar orbit, a new story unfolds of discovering remarkable fields of orange glass beads, remnants of volcanic eruptions billions of years ago, chronicled in detail by Evans using his own eyes to locate detail no camera of the time could capture. Bowman’s new examination shows how the discoveries of half a century ago continue to influence thinking today on how the moon was formed.
This is the story of an individual who, whatever he was doing, had that most important of qualities. He was happy.
Bok’s Giant Leap: One Moon Rock’s Journey through Time and Space, Neil Armstrong (illustrated by Grahame Baker Smith), 2021.
Did you know that Neil Armstrong wrote a children’s book? I didn’t, until now.
And neither did he, it seems.
The first person to set foot on the moon, Armstrong passed away a decade ago. But this book is his words; it’s a very amusing little speech he gave when he was at a ceremony where NASA presented him with a moon rock. As with most speeches Armstrong gave, it’s finely tuned in its wry humor and insight.
I once chaperoned Armstrong for a day when he was to give a speech honoring the Apollo 8 crew. I came out of my office to find him facing a blank wall, almost nose to nose with it, apparently talking to himself. I was puzzled. But it turned out he was simply reciting his speech. He wanted it to be perfect – and it was. In fact, every time I heard him give a public speech, or offer a book blurb for a dust jacket, it was precisely honed for the particular event and the audience.
Armstrong, as I understand it, never wanted to write a book – which is why a wonderful approved biography, “First Man” by Jim Hansen, was instead created with his full participation. But Armstrong’s widow Carol found this way of sharing his words, and if a book is to exist then this is a nice little volume, aimed squarely at children, with wonderful illustrations by Grahame Baker Smith that perfectly straddle the line between fantasy and reality. I enjoyed looking through it.
The True Story of Alan Bean: The Astronaut who Painted the Moon, Dean Robbins (illustrated by Sean Rubin), 2019.
Apollo 12 moonwalker and Skylab commander Alan Bean passed away in 2018. Written by children’s book author Dean Robbins, Bean was able to review and approve the book manuscript in the year before it was released. Rubin’s illustrations, in a cartoonlike style for the scenes on Earth, become more and more evocative of Bean’s own oil paintings the closer we get to the moon. They are nowhere close to what Bean himself captured in oils in the decades after his moon mission – but then, what could be? I enjoyed reading the descriptions of how Bean created his paintings, scratching them with his space tools, stamping them with moon boots, and sprinkling moon dust into wet paint. It reminded me of a marvelous day I spent in his studio as he used his engineer’s mind to create imaginative art – a fascinating combination. As the book states, Alan inspired many to become astronauts or artists, and sometimes both. I think I even spotted a Sally Ride cameo in the illustrations. This book is an enjoyable focus on someone who performed science on the moon, then used art to tell the rest of us what it felt like to be there.
An Astronaut’s Legacy: The Story of Ellison S. Onizuka, Lisa Nikaido Arakaki (illustrated by Mitchell Fong), 2012.
I picked up this slim volume in the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, where some items related to Onizuka are also on display. He is celebrated in the museum and in this book as the first astronaut of Japanese origin, and mourned as one of the crew who died aboard space shuttle Challenger in 1986. The book has been published by the Nikkei Writers Guild, who assist first-time Nikkei authors with professional publications. Aimed at kids and teens, we read here the story of a young Asian American boy ready to give a school presentation about this inspiring figure. As the boy puzzles out how to best showcase Onizuka’s legacy, we learn along with him what this astronaut represented to his community and to the world. It’s wistfully elegant in handling not only Onizuka’s life, but also his death pursuing the further exploration of space.