Customer Reviews

All We Did Was Fly to the Moon (History-alive series)

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Mr Lattimer has complied one of the most complete pieces of history pertaining to the early space flights up to the shuttle missions. He has combined with this era all the major events that were taking place around the world at the time this country was experincing it's highest achievement to-date. Well designed and as factual an accounting as you could hope to find. I believe it is the only book on this subject of how and where all the call signs and patches actually came about. Delightful reading, although the type is very small in some case but great for students of all ages, espically middle school and high school levels. Great color, fascinating photographs and seeing the actual front pages of the newspapers from that period in time is wonderful to browse thru. You can put yourself in what ever situation you were in at that exact period in time and feel as though you are part of the book. A must for every household and a price you can easily afford. I know the author and know it took him over 20 yrs to do this book. Buy it, read it, live it and enjoy it !

Much has been written about the Apollo moon landings, from astronaut biographies to highly technical books requiring an advanced degree. In this book, however, the author focuses on a much different topic. Here, for each mission he covers how each spacecraft was named and how each crew patch was designed. In addition to this well researched topic, the books also presents reproduced newspaper front pages that give you the feel for the excitement of the times as well as presenting numerous color and black and white photographs. The book also covers the Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and the early Shuttle landing tests. The final section lists all the contactors and sub-contractors that developed various components for the Apollo program, a very welcomed and hard to find list. While some may feel that moon landing patch designs and spacecraft names is an odd topic for a book about this great adventure, this book will surprise you on how good it truly is.

If you are interested in how a particular space suit patch was designed, fine. If you are interested in how they got to the moon, look elsewhere. The 5-point type on the descriptions is particularly bad - you need to buy reading glasses along with the book.