(limited to those who flew in Apollo)
Charlie Duke (Apollo 16), Moonwalker, with Dotty Duke (Oliver-Nelson, 1990)
Mostly a personable memoir, half boyish enthusiasm and half "fighter jock" pilot. Aims at an exciting description of what it actually felt like to do the job, and Duke does go into some detail on training, but he's less interested in describing the hard work he clearly put in than in recounting his hard-partying lifestyle after hours, and this applies to his Air Force career even more than to his astronaut life. For the Apollo 16 flight, he basically annotates the vocal transcript, which doesn't work particularly well as a reading experience. Afterwards, this book makes some startling turns. At first, Duke is as hard-driving and all-consumed by his new business career as he was at NASA. But then he discovers the Bible and finds that Jesus wants him to stop ignoring his wife and children and taking them for granted. (His wife Dotty's signed contribution to this book is a chapter giving her experience of the frustrations of an empty life and eventually finding that love for Jesus filled it.) At this point, Duke seems to have found some balance in his life, and most of the book is written retrospectively from that perspective, gently chiding his career obsession in hindsight, but then in the next chapter he goes over the other edge and becomes an enthusiast for faith healing and the likes of seeing angels guiding your airplane's wings. This viewpoint does not appear elsewhere in the book, though Duke's general enthusiasm is such that he defines himself as one astronaut who actually enjoyed the otherwise universally-despised "week in the barrel" publicity rounds. Duke is even pleased when President Nixon's envoy to an Apollo 16 homecoming celebration is - Nixon's brother.
James B. Irwin (Apollo 15), To Rule the Night: The Discovery Voyage of Astronaut Jim Irwin, with William A. Emerson, Jr. (Holman, 1973)
In the prologue to his memoir, Irwin says he found his spaceflight a spiritually transformative experience, which led to his post-NASA career as a traveling Christian preacher. But, he says, he only realized this afterwards; the flight itself was just too busy for reflection. Accordingly, he drops this aspect until it comes up in its own time. (He does not appear to be the enthusiast for the supernatural that Charlie Duke became.) The Apollo 15 mission covers over half the book. Irwin concentrates on the practical experience of flying in space and walking on the Moon, without getting into technical details, or personalities. He is critical of flaws in planning and equipment which led to dehydration, on which he blames his subsequent medical problems (which continued after the book: he died at 61, young for an astronaut). For his earlier life, Irwin describes himself as something of a goofball who got on by coasting on his natural abilities, and he seems to have done well in the Air Force despite several mistakes and consequent suspensions, including a plane crash which nearly led to a disabling amputation. Some astronauts divorced due to the pressures of the job: Irwin did not, instead - uniquely among his peers - getting his divorce over early after a brief youthful first marriage. He attributes this breakup to religious differences, and is critical of himself without being reflective. Though far less "gosh-wow" than Charlie Duke's, this is is a somewhat breathless book with a distinctly naive air to it.
Irwin also wrote a children's book, Destination: Moon, with Al Janssen (Multnomah, 1989), recounting his career and flight experiences.
Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14), The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut's Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds, with Dwight Williams, revised edition (New Page Books, 2008; originally published 1996); Earthrise: My Adventures as an Apollo 14 Astronaut, with Ellen Mahoney (Chicago Review Press, 2014)
The first quarter of The Way of the Explorer is a memoir of Mitchell's life through the lunar mission; though he outlines his post-NASA life, the rest of the book is sometimes quite complex exposition on the cosmic awareness he spent his later career studying. Like other lunar astronauts, Mitchell found his mission to be spiritually awakening; unlike others, this came to him while he was still on the mission and not just in retrospect, and it was not religious in nature, a viewpoint that seems to irritate him. Mitchell defines his spiritual vision as one of a connection between the human mind and the universe. As a trained scientist (a status he emphasizes in the memoir section) who is also interested in mystical matters, he's well equipped to ask mind-and-matter connective questions like: if quantum observations are affected by the observer's state of mind, how does that relate to the question of whether the mind is not limited to the boundaries generated by human physiology? I don't know if that's a meaningful question or not, but Mitchell would know more about it than most of us. Unfortunately Mitchell's mind is a little too open and he falls in with faith healers and spoon-bending charlatans.
Earthrise is a children's book, but it's longer and for more advanced readers than the other children's books on this list. It covers the same territory as the memoir section of The Way of the Explorer, with a brief epilogue on his later work; the book is written in simpler language, but it's considerably more full of detail on everything from his childhood and schooling to the events of the lunar mission.
Al Worden (Apollo 15), Falling to Earth: An Apollo 15 Astronaut's Journey, with Francis French (Smithsonian Books, 2011)
Very sober and matter of fact compared to his fellows in this section, Worden says he wrote this book to tell his story of the stamps incident, but it doesn't dominate a full-life narrative that only fades away after he leaves NASA altogether. In fact he intersperses his account of how the stamps came to be carried as trivial interruptions to his mission training, which is how he experienced it at the time. In the end, he agrees that taking the stamps to the Moon was a mistake, but argues that NASA overreacted to make an example of the crew, because they'd brushed aside earlier cases of the same thing, so the punishment was disproportionate. Taking the book more generally, Worden portrays himself as a practical man, totally involved with his job - he ruefully acknowledges that this led to his divorce not long before his flight, but because (unlike Donn Eisele) he wasn't keeping a mistress it didn't hurt his career - but he turns remarkably reflective while describing his long solo orbits as CSM pilot around the Moon, musing on how distance from Earth lends perspective on the goals and needs of humanity. His descriptions of his Air Force flying and astronaut training and flight are lucid and clear without getting technical. After being fired as an astronaut - as he bluntly describes it - over the stamps incident, he went to work coordinating airborne science (similar to the cameras and detectors he deployed from the CSM in lunar orbit) at NASA's Ames Research Center, which intrigues me, as I was also at Ames (albeit in a very minor job in a different department) at the same time.
Worden also wrote a children's book, I Want to Know About a Flight to the Moon (Doubleday, 1974), inspired by the children's tv programs about astronaut life he made in collaboration with Mister Rogers. (His decision to work with Mister Rogers rather than Sesame Street makes for the most amusing anecdote in his fuller memoir.)
(No memoirs from: Vance Brand (ASTP), Ron Evans (Apollo 17), Fred Haise (Apollo 13, STS ALT tests), Ken Mattingly (Apollo 16, STS-4, STS-51-C), Stuart Roosa (Apollo 14), Jack Swigert (Apollo 13). Nine others did not fly in Apollo.)
And that's the end of this series of reviews.
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