Chariots for Apollo: The Making of the Lunar Module, Charles R. Pellegrino and Joshua Stoff

The weird writing gets in the way of the story.
—of the story—
The dramatically repeated interjections interrupt the flow and remind me of a junior high essay.
—a junior high essay—

OK, so the writing is third-rate crap. What about the content? Any good?

Who knows. Within the first twenty pages there are two factual inaccuracies: Charley Drew did not bleed to death after being denied admission to a whites-only hospital (p. 15), and the Nedelin disaster was exposed in the West as early as 1965, not 1975 (p. 19, footnote). These things might be forgivable in a book written in the eighties, before Google and Wikipedia, except...well, the latter really isn't acceptable, is it? It's rather connected to the subject matter of the book, and it makes me doubt whether anyone bothered to fact-check anything else. Grr.

Look, this is all bad enough, but the new-age spiritual clap-trap on pages 118-124 takes the cake. What kind of nonsense is this...? Half of it is unedited dialogue about spirits, ghosts, and consciousness. When did this book turn into oral history? Actually, it turns into oral history all over the fucking place, but without quotation marks, or with only the occasional quotation mark and many jarring changes of narrator and perspective. A style editor should have ripped these two idiots a new one.

You might, at this juncture in the narrative, wonder why on earth I bothered to finish this thing. My friend is working on some space project, and this is useful background. Still, fuck these two idiots and their publisher.