Of a Fire on the Moon (also called Moonfire)

"Mailer actually graduated from Harvard as an aeronautical engineer, was drafted into the army, and came back a novelist. It’s no surprise that when he writes about the hardware of Apollo, he writes not just exceptionally well but better than anybody I’ve yet to read. Those of us who were around and sentient journalists from 1961 to 1969 followed this story like there was nothing else on earth. The Vietnam War was going on and we did pay attention to that too. But mostly we were fixated on the American end of the Apollo programme and wistfully angry because we couldn’t find out more about the Russian end. It’s no surprise that Life magazine commissioned Mailer to do it. Esquire magazine had already gotten him to do two or three pieces which are among the best journalism I have ever read. Of a Fire on the Moon is not a book that’s likely to stay in print indefinitely because great chunks of it are self-indulgent rubbish. Whenever I pick it up—and I do so every year or two—I read his account of being a witness to the launch of Apollo and it is prose that brings tears to my eyes. I cannot tell you how good it is. There’s no substitute for picking the chapter up and reading it yourself. And it’s strangely uneconomical. With Haldane you feel he has said as little as he possibly can and packed meaning into it with wonderful clarity. Mailer has done the same by picking the words up and throwing them at you as if you were a wall. But they stick. Yes, there’s that wonderful passage about what it takes to actually make a rocket leave the ground: how you have to claw it down and hold it there before it can actually take off. All of that is terrific. And it puts into a strange perspective the odd dismissive tone he has for what you might call the ‘NASA engineer’ sort. At the time, none of us wanted to be NASA engineers. We thought that they were rather boring. But we couldn’t help revelling in their achievements. The idea that you could get 24,000 people to cooperate in getting a rocket off the ground and to the moon and back seemed to be an exercise is national self-indulgence but, of course, it was a great thing to do. It’s a cliché but we understand the world differently because we’ve left and looked back at it. Of a Fire on the Moon is still my favourite book about that great adventure."