Okay give me a hard time, but since my revisit to the Kennedy Space Center I have looked a little deeper into the whole space program thing. Realize as a kid growing up I was a NASA junkie...Space Camp baby! In addition I discovered Alibris and ordered a bunch of used books. Having always been a big favorite of Neil (I have my reasons ;-)), I thought this would be a perfect book to find out about the man. First off, great biography...very in-depth, very thorough. Although a major complaint is that it would have been nice to have more additional comments from the man being written about. But of course this wasn't an autobiography, just an authorized biography (as I have mentioned in previous blogs my favorite astronaut book is Michael Collins' Carrying the Fire).
For a true look at what it took to get to the moon and how it "felt" to go then what Collins wrote is your book. I put felt in quotations because I really wanted to know what it was like for a man to be the first on the moon. If you are wondering what Neil thought well don't read this book. 600 pages and the one thing that comes to me throughout this book is how wholly unresponsive Neil truly is (was) about any personnel feelings about going to the moon. This man was so guarded it was if he let loose on any "feeling" answer he might say something too personal or explode. Can someone be so analytical, so careful in speech that it prevents feelings from being explained (god how did wife stay married to him for so long?) How can anyone be so guarded? I am shocked, throughout this entire book, how totally blank Neil truly was. Either it was a massive front or this man is completely devoid of any feelings. I was just amazed how page after page you read about this man and how he utterly failed to tell us how he felt as a human being who first stepped foot on another planet. Give us something, throw us a bone, there has got to be something...even the most scientific person has some feelings, emotions, or thoughts. Neil has absolutely none. I didn't expect NASA to put a poet on the moon first and I'm glad Gene Cernan wasn't it, but you'd think that the first man would open up about something as fantastic as this. Doesn't he understand the human need about hearing a story. This was such a grand story...I understood the pressure...but once it was all over, once you were home safe, don't you think you would have reflected on your journey...just a little bit? It is unfortunate that of the 12 men who visited and walked on the surface of the moon, how they truly have failed as storytellers. Only Alan Bean has shown some personnel feelings through his paintings...perhaps the others just don't have the imagination to comprehend what they were a part of. Neil in all of his analytical abilities never gave his left side of his brain the opportunity to truly feel. The greatest journey of all time has been dissected, written about, diagrammed, engineered, but never truly told as a story. Perhaps I should rewatch "From the Earth to the Moon (?). I don't remember the Apollo 11 feature. Which is probably fitting because even after almost 40 years the whole moon thing just seems like a dream anyway. But I have rambled on about that so I won't repeat that tirade.
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