Buzz Aldrin (Gemini 12, Apollo 11), Return to Earth, with Wayne Warga (Random House, 1973); Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon, with Ken Abraham (Harmony Books, 2009); Men from Earth, with Malcolm McConnell (Bantam, 1989); No Dream is Too High: Life Lessons from a Man Who Walked on the Moon, with Ken Abraham (National Geographic, 2016)
Like Jimmy Carter among Presidents, Buzz Aldrin has written more memoirs than any other astronaut. Despite its title, Return to Earth, his first, is a memoir of his complete life up to the date of publication, but it focuses on the exhaustion of the post-moonlanding international tours and Aldrin's subsequent treatment for depression. It's brutally revelatory, about his medical conditions, his marital infidelities, and more; he even says much more about excretory functions in space than any other astronaut sees fit to discuss. Magnificent Desolation is more restrained in tone, and may be seen as a sequel; beginning with Apollo 11, it skims lightly through the post-Apollo period covered by Return to Earth, and then concerns itself with a medical problem Aldrin hadn't previously realized he had, alcoholism; that eventually solved, he carves out a career as a speaker on and promoter of space exploration, including space tourism, a cause few other astronauts support. In the process, Aldrin gives detail on his first and second divorces and his second and third marriages (a third divorce was to follow, despite the book's rosy ending).
The other books are less formally memoirs. Men from Earth is a history of rocketry and space exploration from 1944 to 1969, divided into three parallel strands: the American program, the Russian program, and (separately until he's assigned to a flight) Aldrin's personal history from West Point on. No Dream is Too High is a collection of short exhoratory essays, many of them drawing from and retelling previously-told stories from his space travels and life history to illustrate their lessons.
Especially in his later books, Aldrin defends himself from a fair number of criticisms laid in other accounts. For instance, he insists that he never campaigned to be the first on the lunar surface, but that is not the impression that most others had at the time.
Aldrin has also written a memoir for small children, Reaching for the Moon: My Journey to the Moon (HarperCollins, 2005).
Alan Bean (Apollo 12, Skylab), Apollo: An Eyewitness Account, with Andrew Chaikin (Greenwich Workshop Press, 1998)
The only book on this list in coffee-table format, it's not really a memoir. The format is to allow room for reproductions of Bean's paintings of astronauts on the lunar surface, the making of which was his principal occupation in later life. The main text is Chaikin's account of Bean's career, focused on the Apollo 12 mission and particularly on the moonwalk. Bean's textual contribution is mostly captions to the paintings. Bean painted all the lunar missions, not just his own, and he insists that he's painstakingly depicting each astronaut in his individual character despite the fact that they're all wearing identical spacesuits and their faces aren't visible behind their reflective visors. The captions concentrate on the details of surface work tasks, and are highly "gosh-wow" patriotically proud of the missions ("There are only six flags on the moon and all of them are the stars and stripes," that sort of thing, never mind that at least one fell over during takeoff, which he doesn't mention), and Chaikin's text from Bean's perspective takes pretty much the same attitude. Bean also describes being artistically inspired by Monet to depict the surface as more colorful than he saw it, and in that and other respects (one painting depicts his CMP Dick Gordon on the surface with himself and Pete Conrad, because he wishes Gordon could have been there too) the art is idealized as much as it is a record of how he experienced his moonwalk.
Bean also wrote a children's memoir, My Life as an Astronaut: The Exciting Story of One of the First People to Walk on the Moon, with Beverly Fraknoi (Pocket Books, 1988).
Eugene Cernan (Gemini 9, Apollo 10, Apollo 17), The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America's Race in Space, with Don Davis (St Martin's, 1999)
Commander of the last lunar mission, Cernan boarded the LM after his co-pilot did, thus the book's title. A fairly career-oriented memoir, thrilled at his good fortune and ready to tackle with sheer gumption any task he's assigned, and ready to admit his flaws and mistakes, without explaining how someone considered fairly run-of-the-mill in ability as astronauts go got so many prime slots. (The answer is basically that he had his first commmander, Tom Stafford, pulling for him.) Cernan is most interesting describing the absolute torture of impossible tasks that his badly-planned EVA on Gemini 9 turned out to be. (Not his fault, though some wondered if some other astronaut might have handled it better: probably not.) After that flight made him known, Cernan started hanging out in celebrity circles, and he wants to tell you about that, too, especially to assure you that Spiro Agnew was a really nice guy and a close personal friend. Cricks. But the book does read well.
Michael Collins (Gemini 10, Apollo 11), Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1974)
The first full memoir by an astronaut, and still considered one of the best. Outstandingly clearly and entertainingly written, without a ghoster. Collins' becoming modesty belies his reputation as one of the most skilled and effective astronauts. Gives a lot of attention to the goals of what astronauts did at work between flights, devoting a total of 20 pages to explaining what each man in his group was assigned for his specialty in the program (Collins himself handled pressure suits and EVA), which is more for each man than some of his fellows devote to discussing their own specialties. Collins' energy on such matters is such that his somewhat cluttered actual spaceflights are the least interesting part of his book. Conspicuously for an astronaut full-life memoir, this thoughtful but unreflective book basically omits his childhood, schooling, and personal life, and it also fades out pretty quickly after his NASA retirement (mostly because it was written pretty quickly after that), but it devotes a lot to his Air Force career. Predating as it does Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, this book shows unselfconsciously how someone with the right stuff thinks. On his Korean War-era fighter jet training at Nellis AFB, Collins writes, "In the eleven weeks I was there, twenty-two people were killed. In retrospect it seems preposterous to endure such casualty rates without help from the enemy, but at the time the risk appeared perfectly acceptable." They'd fly all day and party in Vegas all night, after which "we were expected back at the flight line, ready to hurl our little pink bodies into the blue once more. ... I have never felt quite so threatened since."
Collins has also written an older children's version of his memoir, Flying to the Moon and Other Strange Places (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1976), revised as Flying to the Moon: An Astronaut's Story (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994 and 2019).
Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7), The All-American Boys, revised edition (ibooks, 2003; originally published 1977)
Cunningham admits that his prickly personality didn't help his career. Nor did the fact that, though a Marine reserve pilot, he was also a scientist, having almost completed a Ph.D. in geophysics when selection by NASA interrupted his work; scientists were not thought highly of in the astronaut office. He got just the one flight, checking out the Apollo command module. However, Cunningham ignores his scientific work. This semi-memoir, semi-topic themed work is almost all about personalities: competition between astronauts in every area of life, cooperation once assigned to flight teams. Devotes full chapters to otherwise-underdiscussed aspects of the astronaut lifestyle: what it's like being treated as a hero, extracurricular sex lives, and, most interestingly (though you wouldn't think it), investment opportunities and why astronauts constantly fell for scams. This is the only book to actually tell the risqué joke that is universally acknowledged as the source for the astronauts' term "a week in the barrel" for the dreaded NASA pubicity tours.* Cunningham casually notes that he was one of only two astronauts who supported Goldwater in '64. Ends with criticism of the space shuttle program from an exterior viewpoint, since he wasn't involved in it. He did do much of the setup for Skylab, but he says less about that. (The first edition listed a co-author, "with assistance by Mickey Herskowitz," who disappears from the revised edition.)
Donn Eisele (Apollo 7), Apollo Pilot: The Memoir of Astronaut Donn Eisele, edited by Francis French (U of Nebraska Press, 2017)
Uncovered in a box of Eisele's personal papers decades after his death in 1987, this memoir is fairly short, and well over half of it describes the Apollo 7 flight, after which it abruptly terminates, somewhat before Eisele's NASA career (and his marriage) did. Fortunately, Eisele takes a very practical view of his work, and gives a clear impression of what it actually felt like to do it. For instance, there's a lively description of pushing himself off across the weightless spaceship cabin, looking for the best window to take photos of the Earth from as the ship randomly drifts in orbit. He's occasionally critical of his cranky and sloppy commander, Wally Schirra, but Eisele does not grumble about his flight, and reserves true bitterness only for the Apollo 1 fire, which most of these other astronauts take more in stride. Eisele firmly blames NASA administration for setting impossible schedules and the contractors for trying to meet them without protest. Fortunately, the redesigned Apollo 7 was a far superior spacecraft. There's a postscript from Eisele's second wife which has the book's only discussion of the breakup of his first marriage.
David Scott (Gemini 8, Apollo 9, Apollo 15) and Alexei Leonov (Voskhod 2, Soyuz 19 [ASTP]), Two Sides of the Moon, with Christine Toomey (Thomas Dunne Books, 2004)
A joint memoir of the astronaut and the cosmonaut, who became friendly while working on the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission (Leonov flew it, Scott was a NASA planning manager), written in alternating sections covering their roughly contemporaneous careers. Both are highly personalized stories, concentrating on how they felt emotionally about what they were doing. For Leonov, this becomes an extremely illuminating view of the triumphs and frustrations of the Soviet space program. Scott gives the only first-hand accounts of his exceedingly interesting first two missions, since none of his crewmates on them wrote memoirs. He's also very detailed on the geological explorations of Apollo 15, much more involved in it than his crewmate Jim Irwin; and he is apologetic but rather shifty over the stamps incident. He's pretty much silent on the difficulties of his post-NASA business career. Scott's emotional frankness even covers such unlikely topics as flying nuclear delivery planes for the Air Force: "It made you feel very aggressive. If the other guy was going to do it, you were going to have to do it. You never thought about it in terms of people. If you were called upon to fight a war, as a soldier you would fight that war. Instead of a club, or a shield and a sword, you had a nuke."
(No memoirs from: William Anders (Apollo 8), Dick Gordon (Gemini 11, Apollo 12), Rusty Schweickart (Apollo 9), or Charles Bassett, Roger Chaffee, Ted Freeman, C.C. Williams (all died before flight))
*The joke? Something about a crusty mining prospector back in old-timey frontier days, who comes into town after a long tour in the wilderness, hungry for some sexual companionship. Told he'll find a willing partner in the back room of the saloon, he goes there and finds a barrel with a hole in it.
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