The Horn Book, July/August 2006:

From launch to splashdown, Thimmesh gives names and voices to the 400,000-strong army that got Neil Armstrong to the moon and back. Taking as her organizing principle the journey itself, she describes how each element was made possible by NASA and its many contractors. Thus readers learn about the 14,000 plus people at North American Rockwell who built the command module Columbia, the 17,000 people at NASA's launch operations, and so on, from the women who sewed the spacesuits to the engineers who designed the re-entry parachutes. The narrative balances what could become a recitation of corporate names with a colloquial approach (at times a little too breezy) and high drama, from the disaster speech President Nixon never had to make to the various hair-raising glitches that could have made that speech a reality. An extraordinary amount of primary source material aids in giving specificity to the thousands: the recollections of many of the key players, recorded in interviews with the author, share space with excerpts from mission transcripts and the TV broadcast of the event. A gracious plenty and more of back matter both authenticates the narrative and gives eager readers many directions for further exploration. Add a striking white-on-black design and gorgeous archival photographs (many of them full-page) and the result is a spectacular and highly original addition to the literature of space exploration. V.S.

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