It's half a century since the first Moon landing and we've collected together all the best books (and some films) that you'll want to read about the Apollo 11 mission, based on recommendations from experts. With these highly readable books, you'll relive the nail-biting race between NASA and the Soviet Union to put the first human being on the moon, learn about the thousands of engineers who were instrumental in making it happen, and the three astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins—who were lucky enough to be on the Apollo 11 mission and become the first human beings to walk on the Moon (except Collins, who stayed in the command capsule circling the Moon).
Why read books about the Moon landing? Astronomer Philip Plait gave his answer when we interviewed him on the wonders of the Universe, "I’ve debunked the idea that the moon landings were fake I don’t even know how many times over the years. I became a bit jaded." But then he read A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin: "Reading this book lit the fire under me again and made me realise that telling the true story of one of the greatest adventures mankind has ever undertaken is worth doing."
Filmmaker and author Christopher Riley talks us through the best Apollo 11 books (and one documentary).
Here's our selection of the best books on the Moon landings capturing all the excitement of the last age of adventure and exploration:
“Andrew Chaikin writes about all the difficulty of trying to invent all of this stuff at that time. He’s a brilliant writer and journalist. He took the time, back in the early 1990s, to go around and interview as many of the key players—including the astronauts themselves—who turned this dream into a reality. That, to me, is what makes A Man on the Moon the really definitive biography of Apollo, because many of those people, sadly, have died now. He has this ultimate record of what it was all about and what it meant to those that did it.” Read more...
Christopher Riley, Film Director
Apollo: the Race to the Moon
by Catherine Bly Cox & Charles Murray
Apollo: the Race to the Moon is "a superb account of how NASA managed a complex operation involving thousands of employees."
Apollo 11
Directed by Todd Douglas Miller
Apollo 11 is a documentary about the Moon landing, described in the New York Times as "one of the most rousing movies ever made about NASA and space exploration"
“I read his account of being a witness to the launch of Apollo and it is prose that brings tears to my eyes.” Read more...
The best books on Science Writing
Tim Radford, Science Writer
The Women of the Moon: Tales of Science, Love, Sorrow and Courage
by Daniel Altschuler & Fernando Ballesteros
All the human beings who landed on the Moon were men. Of the 1586 craters on the Moon that have been named in honour of scientists and philosophers, 1558 were named after men. The Women of the Moon is a beautiful, beautiful book about the 28 craters named after women. It looks at the lives of those women, from astronomer, mathematician and philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria in the 4th and 5th century through to the four women who died in the two space shuttle disasters. The last entry in The Women of the Moon is Valya Tereshkova, the first woman in space and still alive in 2019.
Written by physics professor and radio astronomy expert Daniel Altschuler Stern and Fernando Ballesteros Rosello, Head of Instrumentation at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Valencia, you'll also learn a lot about the Moon along the way.
Note: The Women of the Moon was translated from Spanish. The Spanish title is Las Mujeres de la Luna.
“He writes beautifully and it’s very readable. The words in the story just leap off the page into your mind and memory. It’s about tracking down these 12 men who had this extraordinarily unique and rare experience of standing on another world, 400,000 kilometers from Earth, looking back at their home planet.” Read more...
Christopher Riley, Film Director
“This book takes you from the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager up to the start of the Apollo programme. It’s before all of the stuff that people would say is the heyday of NASA, like the moon landings and so on. It’s everything that happened before.” Read more...
The Best Physics Books for Teenagers
Kate Lee, Teacher
Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon
by James Harford
The Americans may have put the first man on the Moon, but it was the Russians who put the first satellite into orbit and the first man into space. This book is about the life and work of the mastermind of the Soviet space programme, Sergei Korolev, who was kept anonymous until after his death in 1966.
As Tom Wolfe writes so memorably in The Right Stuff, "The Soviet program gave off an aura of sorcery. The Soviets released practically no figures, pictures or diagrams. And no names; it was revealed only that the Soviet program was guided by a mysterious individual known as "the Chief Designer." But his powers were indisputable! Every time the United States announced a great space experiment, the Chief Designer accomplished it first, in the most startling fashion."
This book reveals the fascinating man who was that Chief Designer, a survivor of the Stalinist purges in the 1930s and imprisonment in a gulag where 30% of prisoners died.
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
by Svetlana Alexievich
Why put Nobel prize-winning Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time on a list of the best Moon landing books? Because the Soviet achievements in space were such an important driver of the Apollo programme. This book is not about the Soviet space programme per se, but Alexievich’s description of how the Soviet people reacted when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space is one of the most unforgettable passages of nonfiction writing we’ve read.
Carrying the Fire
by Michael Collins
Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins is "widely regarded as the best of the memoirs written by astronauts", according to science writer and space expert Andrew Chaikin. Of the three astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission, Michael Collins was the one who did not walk on the Moon, but circled it and waited for the others to return. As well as the actual Moon landing, his memoir takes you through every step of the training and preparation. It's also quite funny: Michael Collins likes to joke.
“Our vision with In the Shadow of the Moon was to capture the astronauts’ first-hand memories on film. Interestingly, that hadn’t been done for all the Moon walkers at that point in history.” Read more...
Christopher Riley, Film Director
“You’ve got to remember that honouring Kennedy’s challenge of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth required an enormous effort. It was the work of 400,000 people for a decade, so four million human years of work went into solving the elaborate daisy-chain of engineering challenges that allowed you to do this journey to the surface of the Moon, collect some rocks, explore, and come back.” Read more...
Christopher Riley, Film Director
“First Man by James Hansen is this wonderfully detailed portrait of Neil Armstrong. It’s a very, very thorough insight into who this man was. It’s not for the faint-hearted—there is a lot of detail—but I have a soft spot for this book.” Read more...
Christopher Riley, Film Director
The Best Apollo Books, recommended by Christopher Riley
The lesson of the Apollo programme is that anything is possible, says filmmaker and author Christopher Riley. He talks us through the best books (and one documentary) about America’s race with the Soviet Union to put the first man on the Moon.
