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T O P I C R E V I E WFFrenchI see the news this morning that American novelist Norman Mailer has died. For the space audience, he may be best remembered for his book about Apollo 11, "Of a Fire on the Moon."A moment of silence is signified by an entry with no words and only a period.Lunar rock nut.Apollo-Soyuz.SRB.Jay Gallentine.fabfivefreddy.randy.dss65.ea757grrl.cspg.(and maybe his works, including his Apollo book, will be reissued, preferably in French. Didn't know he wrote a book about Apollo...)Rick Mulheirn.Cliff LentzIt's a shame that Norman Mailer passed away. I know him from several sports-related works. I wonder how many people have read "Of a Fire on the Moon."? I read it and I own it. It's not really a flattering picture of Apollo 11. As I remember, he talks about how boring covering the event was. Maybe I'll go back and read it again, but I know there's a reason that it's on the back shelves of my space collection and I never made an attempt to get it signed even though I could have.CliffRobert Pearlman quote:Originally posted by Cliff Lentz:It's not really a flattering picture of Apollo 11. James Hansen spent several pages in First Man deconstructing Mailer's impression of Armstrong: quote:Not until he constructed his own myth out of Armstrong could the creative mind of Norman Mailer be satisfied. It did not matter that Mailer would never meet Neil face to face, never once talk to him directly, never ask him a single question of his own. Mailer, too, had sat before the oracle, "the most saintly of the astronauts," someone who was "simply not like other men," who was "apparently in communion with some string in the universe others did not think to play." It was up to Mailer, up to Aquarius, to decode Armstrong. And later... quote:There was no denying the brilliance of Mailer's exposé. Yet Mailer really did not care about Armstrong, the man, on a personal level, only as a vessel into which the author could pour his own mental energy and profundity. What Mailer wrote in his chapter "The Psychology of Astronauts" was highly provocative and insightful as social criticism, but as history, biography, or real psychology, it shed considerably more heat than light.cddfspace.
A moment of silence is signified by an entry with no words and only a period.
(and maybe his works, including his Apollo book, will be reissued, preferably in French. Didn't know he wrote a book about Apollo...)
Cliff
quote:Originally posted by Cliff Lentz:It's not really a flattering picture of Apollo 11.
quote:Not until he constructed his own myth out of Armstrong could the creative mind of Norman Mailer be satisfied. It did not matter that Mailer would never meet Neil face to face, never once talk to him directly, never ask him a single question of his own. Mailer, too, had sat before the oracle, "the most saintly of the astronauts," someone who was "simply not like other men," who was "apparently in communion with some string in the universe others did not think to play." It was up to Mailer, up to Aquarius, to decode Armstrong.
quote:There was no denying the brilliance of Mailer's exposé. Yet Mailer really did not care about Armstrong, the man, on a personal level, only as a vessel into which the author could pour his own mental energy and profundity. What Mailer wrote in his chapter "The Psychology of Astronauts" was highly provocative and insightful as social criticism, but as history, biography, or real psychology, it shed considerably more heat than light.
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