Mr. Fishman is a veteran space reporter with a vibrant touch—nearly every sentence has a fact, an insight, a colorful quote or part of a piquant anecdote. What’s more, he has pondered the meaning of the moon landing and arrived at a surprising and persuasive answer ... Mr. Fishman is a connoisseur of fascinating detail, as well.
In his meticulously researched and absorbingly written book, journalist Charles Fishman provides both a celebration of the Apollo 11 mission and a corrective to some of the myths that have crystallized around it ... To the criticism that the Apollo program was a 'moondoggle' (in the words of sociologist Amitai Etzioni) and a waste of billions of dollars that could have been better spent addressing social ills at home, Fishman offers a persuasive defense ... As tempting as it would be to recommend One Giant Leap as a welcome diversion from our current political chaos, that meditation invites the question of what has become of that spirit in the self-dealing era of President Trump...But Fishman rescues what could have come across as an outdated paean to American exceptionalism with a crucial caveat.
While Fishman is interested in the origins of the space race and the mechanics of problem solving that got us there, he's just as concerned with the ways Apollo transformed us ... spends considerable and well-used time demonstrating NASA's role in birthing digital technologies that are now ubiquitous.
