Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America into the Space Age

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. (June)