My bookshelf·Index No. 0391

The Moon

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Morton is a science writer and this is the moon from every angle at once. How it formed and why that mattered for life here. What Apollo actually was as a political project and what it felt like. The geology of a dead world and what the samples told us. Then the long strange history of the moon in imagination — the fiction, the hoaxes, the paintings — and finally the present push to go back, the water at the poles, and who thinks they’ll own it. He’s good on the emotional fact underneath it all: A generation watched people walk up there and then nobody went again for fifty years.

The Moon
By Oliver Morton. Economist, 2019. 352 pages.