In 1999,Andrew Smith was interviewing Charlie Duke,astronaut and moon walker,for the Sunday Times. During the course of the interview,which took place at Duke's Texan home,the telephone rang and Charlie left the room to answer it. When he returned,some twenty minutes later,he seemed visibly upset. It seemed that he'd just heard that,the previous day,one of his fellow moon walkers,the astronaut Pete Conrad,had died.'Now there's only nine of us,'he said. Only nine. Which meant that,one day not long from now,there would be none,and when that day came,no one on earth would have known the giddy thrill of gazing back at us from the surface of the moon. The thought shocked Andrew Smith,and still does. Moondust is his attempt to understand why.
MEDIA REVIEWS
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLCISBN: 9781408802380Number of pages: 384Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 23 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Smith's mix of reporting and meditation is highly entertaining,and this superb book is a fitting tribute to a unique band of twentieth-century heroes'GQ'A moving and thorough account of America's last great act of optimism'Guardian'Fascinating and disturbing. We know what happened inside the Apollo Space Craft,but what went on inside the astronauts'minds Did any of them really recover from their strange journey Extremely thought-provoking'J. G. Ballard'Smith's mission - gloriously realised in this spellbinding book - is to seek out the last nine and discover how the decades have treated the only humans to have walked on another world...a wonderful collective biography written with deftness,compassion and humour'Observer
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