Customer Reviews

One Giant Leap: The Extraordinary Story of the Moon Landing

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The author, Tim Furniss, is a prolific author of twenty books about spaceflight, spacecraft and the space program in general, as well as the author of numerous magazine articles about various aspects of space flight. In this book, the author presents an overview of the space race from the launching of the first Russian and US satellites until the first moon landing of Apollo 11, using numerous photographs, artist's renditions and graphs and a reasonable amount of supporting text. Even though much of the book, about a third, focuses of the first moon landing of Apollo 11, the remainder of the book covers the space race up to this point.

While many of the NASA photographs are the classic pictures from the Apollo program, the book also includes a good number of rarely seen pictures from the testing and buildup phases, as well as some photographs taken by the unmanned robotic explorers sent to the moon, which I found quite interesting. Oftentimes, the testing and buildup stages of any space launch is ignored and I found it refreshing the author did not forget this important part of the Apollo program. Furthermore, unlike many other texts on the USSR-US space race to the moon, this author provides many fascinating pictures of the Russian hardware, such as the N-1 moon rocket and the Vostok, which better helps depict the space race.

One final thought, I found the last chapter, "Where are They Now?" which describes the moon walkers post-Apollo lives, a fitting tribute and ending for the book.

Even though Amazon lists this book as no longer in print, I have seen this book still for sale at several local bookstores.