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mcgrew writes:

Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13
(published in paperback as Apollo 13)
Hardcover, 378 pages

Houghton Mifflin, October 1994)
ISBN 0-395-67029-2

        Apollo 13 lifted off a week or so after my eighteenth birthday. Of course, it had my attention, although not as much as when Apollo 11 landed [mcgrewbooks.com]. Nobody else was much interested by then. At least, until everybody thought all the astronauts onboard were on their way to death.

        When I saw the movie Apollo 13, it seemed realistic. Nothing in the movie contradicted anything I remembered seeing in the newspaper or that Walter Cronkite said. I looked for this book in every library I had access to, unsuccessfully. Then I got the movie out again and decided to just buy the book a few weeks ago. I found a used hardcover copy on Amazon only a buck or two more expensive than the e-book.

        I didn’t have to read far to realize that the movie wasn’t nonfiction. It was “based on a true story” and its makers dishonestly advertised it as nonfiction. Much of the movie was made up out of whole cloth.

        It was co-written by Jeffrey Kluger, a journalist, and Apollo 13 Mission Commander Jim Lovell. Wikipedia informs me that the book was Kluger’s idea, and pitched it to the two surviving Apollo 13 astronauts; Jack Swigert had died of cancer in 1982. “Fredo,” as Lovell called Fred Haise, wasn’t interested in the idea.

        The prologue starts off with the debunking of an urban myth that said that astronauts had poison pills they could take if they were ever stranded in space.

        This is a serious book about a serious incident in history. Chapter one starts “Jim Lovell was having dinner at the White House when his friend Ed White burned to death” about the Apollo 8 fire, although later it was found that the smoke poisoned them. It goes on describing how Lovell was a nerd who loved rockets as a teenager, and spoke of test piloting and early space flights before it gets around to the Apollo 13 launch.

        It’s an excellent book, very well written. I found it enjoyable and informative. Any high school teacher who thinks about showing the class the fictional movie based on this fine book would be wise to read the book first.

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