Story: Jeffrey Kluger’s insightful volume on the Apollo program from inception right through to the end is another treasure trove of information on that most daring era of Ameircan space exploration, focusing on other aspects that just the flight of Apollo 13.
Review: When I saw the blurb in the back of Apollo 13 nee Lost Moon for a trade paperback companion book, I figured it would be a kiddie item that really ought to be given away with Hardee’s Apollo Burgers. Wrong again.
While the “making of the movie” segments are fascinating, I wish there had been even more hard fact in here. Kluger needs to sit down and write another whole book on the Apollo era. Highlights of “The Apollo Adventure” include numerous cockpit flight recorder transcriptions – many declassified for the first time and most of them not suitable for the pre-teen set! – and a detailed breakdown of the Apollo 7 flight which caused mutual headaches for Walter Schirra’s crew of three and NASA administrators alike.
The book is certainly at its most ponderous and questionable when it conducts a double interview with Apollo head flight controller Gene Kranz and movie director Ron Howard, asking how their roles in the mission and the movie were alike. Give me a break! Kranz led a skilled team of professionals who had to snap out of their routine and save the lives of three men against literally astronomical odds. Ron Howard directed a movie in Hollywood. There is no comparison. It’s like comparing Jim Lovell to Tom Hanks; no doubt they’re both solid professionals at what they do, but one has spent hundreds of hours in the hazardous vacuum of space, while the other has logged hundreds of screen hours in the vacuous hazard that is Hollywood. With all due respect to Tom Hanks, his contributions haven’t really advanced the cause of science. I appreciate his efforts to popularize it, but that’s about all.
“The Apollo Adventure” could be better. Hopefully Kluger will see this in the future and work on a straight-facts volume that could easily be the most informative resource of information of the Apollo era to date. The sad part is that there had to be a movie before anyone else was interested in this material.
Year: 1995
Author: Jeffrey Kluger
Publisher: Pocket Books
Pages: 199 pages
