Man on the Moon: a day in the life of Bob

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The writing is also just really good - the exciting parts were exciting! The moving bits were moving. What really made it for me was the experiences of the astronauts - it's very human. This is really not that technical, although now I kind of want to see what's written about the geology of the moon. Like did you know that NASA just opened up some samples from Apollo 17?? They set them aside for 50 years until science had advanced. So cool. I read a bunch about Martian geology after watching some of Mike Brown's lectures - apparently I'm into geology now? Chaikins 'A man on the Moon' is a comprehensive and chronological story about the people, the engineering and the politics allied to the completion of John F Kennedy's mission to reach the moon. In terms of the Apollo missions this book is the authoritative masterpiece. Children love clueless Bob and the aliens who ‘aren’t really there’. Bob is as silly as he looks and it is fun to play with the idea of a grown up with such an important job (keeping the moon clean and tidy and performing for space tourists) can be so oblivious to what we can see (as the adult, it’s fun to pretend you can’t see them too). This worked really well as a class text with year 1 children, lots of opportunities to explore inference and dramatic irony and both the story and the beautiful oil painting illustrations capture their imagination enough to provide a term’s worth of activities alongside topic exploration: Don’t spoil it if I learn about it later but I was intrigued to find Mother Goose in the picture with the other Guardians. I was raised on nearly all her nursery rhymes, even the ones most people have never heard. So she was a ‘guardian’ I was very close to as a child. My favorite passage relates the thoughts of Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders after he had just seen and photographed the earth as no human had ever done before – in its entirety, from the distance of the moon:

Once MiM sets about his mission of making the children of Earth happy I got really lost in the story. The tale brings together Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and many other familiar childhood figures. It even tells how MiM set about lighting up the moon so the children of Earth never had to be afraid of the night again. My children absolutely loved the appearance of all the figures and it definitely got them asking questions about each of them. We all hope that there will be a book for each Guardian and will be anxiously awaiting the arrival of more books! Creating a timeline of Bob’s day looking at sequencers, first, then, next... Children then create their own timelines of their ideal day on the moon. How and by whom are perceptions of difference transformed, and with what implications for future relations? There is also the story of Alan Shepard,who managed to get the command of Apollo 14,at the ripe age of 47,much to the dismay of the others,who had been waiting in line.If you were to ask me before I read this book "who is Frank Borman?" I would not have been able to tell you. Commander of Apollo 8, they were the first crew to complete trans-lunar injection and travel the quarter of a billion miles to reach lunar orbit. The first crew to ever orbit the moon. There were numerous times during this book where I had to stop reading and fully comprehend the importance and synergistic meaning behind each Apollo mission. The first sentence of this book effectively ignites a child's curiosity. Astronauts Mike Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were the first humans to land on the moon when some claimed it “could not be done.” Using a powerful mixture of text and illustrations, ‘Man on the Moon’ follows the Apollo 11’s journey into space, the astronauts’ first steps, items they collected, and the patriotic symbol left behind. Like most kids from a young age I have always had an interest in space travel and astrology. However this is my first time reading about the missions and the individual pioneers who first traversed out of earths orbit 5 decades ago.

My audiobook was 23 hours long, and I don’t recommend it. The narrator, actor Bronson Pinchot, has won several Audie Awards, one of them for this book. I find this a little surprising. For me it was an extremely dull experience to listen to him. The only time I remember hearing some excitement in his voice was when the matter of urinating in space came up. Incidentally a thing I got excited about as well. I guess observed from afar those kinds of experiences are just too damn funny. Another fine account is Chaikin's re-telling of the landing pad fire aboard Apollo 1, which killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. It is one of the saddest moments in the history of the Apollo program, and Chaikin manages to strike a balance between respect for the fallen and the investigation that came to see the accident as a "failure of imagination." He avoids the temptation of the maudlin, and the three dead astronauts would undoubtedly have appreciated that.On his way into a fitful sleep, Anders began to realize: We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the earth. I really loved that Chaikin covered the entire Apollo age with an eye towards balance: the details and eccentricities of each particular mission are always held up to the overarching narrative of the Apollo program as a whole, which is super important because each flight builds on the ones that came before it. So, at the end, I feel like I've got a much better understanding of spaceflight history. The chapters on missions like 8, 11, and 13 are obviously longer and more in depth, but I was especially surprised how fascinating the more science focused later missions were! Chaikin's narrative focuses, primarily, on the men/missions who went to the moon (versus the holistic Apollo program), with a particular relish for the "skipper" missions—the ones that are usually skipped over during the Apollo summaries (i.e., 12, 14, 15, 16). I mostly appreciated it, since I, too, have fallen into the trap of not really considering the latter Apollo flights as anything exciting—but they were, and are: they introduced new equipment and tested new boundaries around life on the moon. Each mission had minor things adjusted or added to it or expanded within it, which makes the evolution of Apollo that much more obvious and interesting. This tale starts off perfectly happy but once Pitch, the King of Nightmares, finds out that this boy has never had a nightmare he vows to make the boy his own and deem him the Prince of Nightmares. In the outcome of the battle the boy is left alone on the moon to be raised by the Moonbots, Moonmice and giant Glowworms who were also left behind. As he grows, he discovers the planet Earth through his father's telescope & realises that there are children on the far away planet that are much like him. As the children's lost balloons float up to him he finds that he can hear their hopes and dreams if he held them to his ear.

If you ask anyone about the topic of 'astronauts' and the 'moon' the frequent return of data starts with 'Neil Armstrong'. Before reading this book much of my knowledge of the moon landings were hazy and my ability to recall the 12 men who have walked on the moon extremely limited. Chaikin explores the lives of the Apollo astronauts in detail and as a reader I found this personal development crucial. The book ends with a look at the things people did after Apollo had ended. But at this point I had mostly lost interest. I don’t remember any zero-gravity peeing happening in that chapter. Upcoming works to be published in May 2009 are Voices from the Moon (Viking Studio) featuring excerpts from his conversations with Apollo astronauts, and Mission Control, This is Apollo (Viking Childrens) a book for middle-school readers illustrated with paintings by Apollo moonwalker Alan Bean. Bartram has a whole series of books about Bob and space, so there gives easy opportunity to explore the world more if students are interested in doing so independently. The book itself does remind me of another picture book I have read, ‘Aliens Love Underpants’ by Claire Freedman and Ben Cort, which I have read before with a pre-school group. There is the obvious link between aliens being a key feature, but the thing that really made me relate the two books is the art and colours used to illustrate the aliens. In Freedman’s book aliens exist peacefully on Earth, much like in Bartram’s book, and not a scary invader of the planet as aliens are often perceived in society. The fact that the story is ‘a day in the life’ style means it is written in the 3rd person, I think this really adds to the narrative as the reader is able to notice things that Bob does not- such as the aliens.I was 10 years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. I truly felt that this “giant leap for mankind” represented not so much the culmination and achievement of a hard-fought, eight-year goal, but more of a new beginning of a far more wondrous and adventurous future. It inspired me to want to be an active participant in the shaping of that future. A former editor of Sky & Telescope magazine, Chaikin has also been a contributing editor of Popular Science and has written for Newsweek, Air&Space/Smithsonian, World Book Encyclopedia, Scientific American, and other publications. Plano author Anastasia Suen has written a remarkable nonfiction children's book about man's first steps on the moon. Reading this book to your child serves as a perfect opportunity to share this historical event with young minds. The language is very appropriate for the targeted 3-8 age range.