Books, Arts & Manners

Of a Fire on the Moon By Norman Mailer Little, Brown, 472 pp., $7.95 Thirty years from now, every American who was at least ten years old in 1963 will remember exactly where he was the day John Kennedy died. The same is true of everyone who watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin sprint about a tiny surface of the moon in the summer of 1969, while Michael Collins sat in his box in the sky. Those two events, JFK’s assassination and Apollo XI, moved more people than any others of the decade: the one so unexpected, inspiring such horror in a nation not yet grown accustomed to the modern politics of assassination; the other so hoped for, eagerly awaited by half the world. The death of the President immediately transfixed a whole people, brought us together for a few days of shared grief, together as we had not been for years and have not been since. But it also inspired in the journalistic necrophiliacs an insatiable urge to report the death again and again from every angle, to bludgeon us with our “collective guilt,” to cheapen, to exploit. As yet, no fully satisfying book-length account of that November day in 1963 has appeared.

The first landing of man on the moon was a triumph for the human race, not perhaps the “greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation,” as President Nixon called it, but certainly an event of tremendous meaning, which also brought Americans and millions of others together. Furthermore, it was a reflection of the abilities of this country, a fact either trumpeted about by those who remembered bitterly that Sputnik had been Russia’s achievement, not ours, or shoved under the table by those who tried to make America feel guilty for spending “so much” money on space while the “problems at home” go unsolved. We recall the many who were angered that Armstrong planted an American flag on the moon instead of a United Nations flag, and those who complained that the venture was somehow racist because it utilized the talents almost exclusively of whites. (Now we must suffer the crowings of those who’ve gotten Washington to cut back the Apollo program drastically.) In the first flush of gleeful self-praise, followed by the denunciations by curmudgeons who minimized the achievement, we were inundated by journalistic appraisals, most of them forgettable.

DB

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David Brudnoy

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Of a Fire on the Moon By Norman Mailer Little, Brown, 472 pp., $7.95 Thirty years from now, every American who was at least ten years old in 1963 will remember exactly where he was the day John Kennedy died. The same is true of everyone who watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin sprint about a tiny surface of the moon in the summer of 1969, while Michael Collins sat in his box in the sky. Those two events, JFK’s assassination and Apollo XI, moved more people than any others of the decade: the one so unexpected, inspiring such horror in a nation not yet grown accustomed to the modern politics of assassination; the other so hoped for, eagerly awaited by half the world. The death of the President immediately transfixed a whole people, brought us together for a few days of shared grief, together as we had not been for years and have not been since. But it also inspired in the journalistic necrophiliacs an insatiable urge to report the death again and again from every angle, to bludgeon us with our “collective guilt,” to cheapen, to exploit. As yet, no fully satisfying book-length account of that November day in 1963 has appeared.

The first landing of man on the moon was a triumph for the human race, not perhaps the “greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation,” as President Nixon called it, but certainly an event of tremendous meaning, which also brought Americans and millions of others together. Furthermore, it was a reflection of the abilities of this country, a fact either trumpeted about by those who remembered bitterly that Sputnik had been Russia’s achievement, not ours, or shoved under the table by those who tried to make America feel guilty for spending “so much” money on space while the “problems at home” go unsolved. We recall the many who were angered that Armstrong planted an American flag on the moon instead of a United Nations flag, and those who complained that the venture was somehow racist because it utilized the talents almost exclusively of whites. (Now we must suffer the crowings of those who’ve gotten Washington to cut back the Apollo program drastically.) In the first flush of gleeful self-praise, followed by the denunciations by curmudgeons who minimized the achievement, we were inundated by journalistic appraisals, most of them forgettable.