The Man Who Ran the Moon: James E. Webb, NASA, and the Secret History of Project Apollo Book

To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, this is a first-rate second rate book. As a book, I give it low marks in terms of argument. It simply lacks a strong message. Its prose is merely ordinary, in line with the decayed standards of modern American non-fiction writing and editing (I think the editing has fallen down more than the writing, good editors cause authors to improve their writing).

This is a shame because the one sterling aspect of the book is its content. Whether or not one is interested in the space program, NASA is a major part of our government and is charged with some pretty big ambitions. This book serves not just as a useful corrective to the heroic image of NASA that emerged out of the triumph of Apollo but also as a fascinating window into a unique organization.

Those of you who like me are space geeks will get a lot out of the book despite its less than stellar structure and prose, primarily because it contains information that I have not seen elsewhere. As such, the book clearly presages the travails of NASA in the last thirty years, from the struggle over building the Space Shuttle, the Hubble fiasco, and the Challenger and Columbia disasters. If you are modestly well read about the American space program, this book will fill in some crucial gaps.

However, I have to damn even the above praise. Given that there are no other popular books on this exact topic, this book is excellent reading for any space exploration and space policy geek. However, it is not the best that could be written on this topic. When this work is compared to a classic such as Robert Caro's THE POWER BROKER, Bizony's best comes up very short indeed. I feel there is considerable room to expand on this topic and produce an outstanding work on the NASA bureaucracy.