Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon

Kluger, Jeffrey

Verlag: Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2017

Beschreibung

New condition black boards with red spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped color illustrated dust jacket. Includes List of Other Books by Jeffrey Kluger; Author Dedication; Prologue; Epilogue; Author's Note; Index and About the Author. Illustrated with a section of both black-and-white and color photographic plates plus color illustrated front and rear endpapers. "No matter how many times you return to the Apollo missions, you never exhaust their thrilling seat-of-your-pants suspense. But here, in the superbly capable hands of Jeffrey Kluger, the little-known story of Apollo 8 bursts vividly to life. I couldn't put it down." - Ken Burns, director. "It was refreshing to read about my friends Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders and follow their record-setting trip to the moon. Jeffrey has got it all exactly straight and I enjoyed reading it very much." - Michael Collins, command module pilot, Apollo 11. "Drawing on historical transcripts and documents and his own extensive interviews with the leading players, Jeffrey Kluger paints a portrait of the U.S. space program and the first manned expedition to the moon so vivid that we feel ourselves riding in the hurtling rocket with the astronauts, taut with the thrill, the danger, and the cosmic meaning of the mission. Apollo 8 is storytelling at its best." - Alan Lightman, MIT professor. "The untold story of the first Apollo mission to the moon, which closed out one of our darkest years with a nearly unimaginable triumph. In August 1968, NASA made a bold decision: in just sixteen weeks, the United States would launch humankind's first flight to the moon. Only the year before, three astronauts had burned to death in their spacecraft, and since then the Apollo program had suffered one setback after another. Meanwhile, the Russians were winning the space race, the Cold War was getting hotter by the month, and President Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade seemed sure to be broken. But when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders were summoned to a secret meeting and told of the dangerous mission, they instantly signed on. Written with all the color and verve of the best narrative nonfiction, Apollo 8 takes us from Mission Control to the astronauts' homes, from the test labs to the launchpad. The race to prepare an untested rocket for an unprecedented journey paves the way for the hair-raising trip to the moon. Then, on Christmas Day, a nation that has suffered a horrendous year of assassinations and war is heartened by an inspiring message from the trio of astronauts in lunar orbit. And when the mission is over - after the first view of the far side of the moon, the first earthrise, and the first reentry through the Earth's atmosphere following a flight to deep space - the impossible dream of walking on the moon suddenly seems within reach. The full story of Apollo 8 has never been told, and only Jeffrey Kluger - Jim Lovell's coauthor of the bestselling book about Apollo 13 - can do it justice. Here is the tale of a mission that was both a calculated risk and a wild crapshoot, a stirring account of how three American heroes forever changed our view of the home planet." - from the inner front jacket flap.

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 010240

Bibliografische Details

• Titel: Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon
• Verlag: Henry Holt and Company, New York
• Erscheinungsjahr: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• Einband: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Levavi, Meryl Sussman (book design); Brennan, Lisa Marie (endpaper illustrations); Miller, Jeff (jacket design)
• Druck: 5th Printing
• Zustand: New
• Zustand des Schutzumschlags: Fine