I have read the book (Czech translation) many years after Apollo 11 actually landed on the Moon. This is the only book by Mailer I have ever read. If you want the story and technical backgroud, go for another Apollo-related book. If you dare being provoked to think on human acts (even such as space flights) from different perspective and are not afraid to ask unusual questions, then go for it. With one objection: Mailer presents himself as Newagean (which he probably is), and it shows -- in my opinion -- too much in the book. Nevertheless, I think it is worth reading.

I like Norman Mailer but not this book. Having read "The Naked and the Dead" and "Harlot's Ghost," I think Mailer is great. I read part of his award-winning "Armies of the Night" in college in the Norton Anthology. Excellent. This one however brings to mind admonitions I've heard over the years about Mailer's titanic ego. It's here alright. The book is written in a modern, new-journalism sort of style; very personal--too personal. I'm not interested in Mailer's personal life when I read an account of America's moon landing! The book is wildly self-centered when he belly-aches about his losing NYC mayoral campaign before taking this assignment. And he complains about the cheap apartments he has to stay in and the heat and his desire for a drink. Very much like early Hunter Thompson in this regard, but without any laughs. Lots of Mailer's boozing mentioned in but matter-of-factly, without the meaningful counter-culture balance early Hunter was so good at when he faced political pomposity. Large sections of "Of a Fire on the Moon" are like late-night rap sessions we used to have at 24-hr diners in college. Mailer waxes not-so-poetic about sex, marriage, death, religion and the meaning of technology in the most incredible meandering, repetitious blab-a-thons. Here and there he plunges into some research or an interesting angle on the Apollo 11 mission and the astronaut personalities but the trouble is that Mailer is too removed from the principles of the story (he doesn't have personal access to anyone, exchanges one line with Von Braun at a speech.) It reminded me of when Hunter Thompson got old and lazy and published books from the point of view of a guy watching news broadcasts on cable. Mailer resorts to imaginative character-creations of the astronaut's wives who he might see from a reporter stage (or a monitor!) for several minutes. Tom Wolf does a brand of "new-journalism" too, but much more successfully in "The Right Stuff." Frankly, a lot of Mailers speculations about the meaning of mankind are just rambling and almost embarrassing. Perhaps he's the absolute wrong writer to do a "story" on the scientist-mentality and the miracle of going to the moon. I'm amazed he is so shocked by the personalities of the astronauts and engineers at Houston. Did he expect a group of creative authors like him would design and build the Saturn V? He's not doing justice to this subject exploration in the same way, let's say, Wolf did in his 60s work, whether it be Ken Kesey's hippies or stock car racers in the south. Wolf hung out with the subjects long enough to expel his Harvard aroma. And he still wore suits! Even Mailer's language here is rather sophmoric compared to the fiction I've already read of his. I hope readers will check out his other superior works.

I did not read "Of a Fire on the Moon" until years after the conclusion of the Apollo Moon landings between 1969 and 1972. Even so, Norman Mailer had inspired me since I first read "The Naked and the Dead" while in high school. At first, "Of a Fire on the Moon" did not attract me, however; it was so existentialist, so counterculture, so Jack Kerouac-esque. It wasn't until the 1990s when I began to explore the cultural history of Project Apollo as an icon of America memory that I returned to "Of a Fire on the Moon" and came to appreciate it's insights.

As one of the foremost contemporary American writers, Mailer was commissioned to write about the first lunar landing in the 1960s. What appeared in 1970 was this rather confusing account that is written as almost stream of consciousness ruminations on spaceflight. It provides useful insights, most importantly as Mailer with his 1960s countercultural mindset meets its antithesis, a NASA steeped in middle class values and reverence for the American flag and culture.

Mailer was forced in "Of a Fire on the Moon," grudgingly to admit that NASA's approach to task accomplishment--which he sees as the embodiment of the Protestant Work Ethic--and its technological and scientific capability got results with Apollo. He rails at NASA's closed and austere society, one where he says outsiders are distrusted and held at arm's length with a bland and faceless courtesy that betrays nothing.

For all of its skepticism, for all of its esotericism, the book captures powerful insights into rocket technology and the people who produced it in Project Apollo, but it is also heavy going to extract them from this dense book.

If you read one book about the Apollo moon landings....this is the one. Any other account is superficial in comparison. The author gives concise technical details of the equipment and procedures of the flight. He also explores the motivation and "psychology" of the astronauts without going gaga over their celebrity. Some funny parts are when he describes the frustration of standing in line for an hour for one soda machine (in a forest of spicy food vending machines, unused). He says 3 men at a ballpark concession stand could service the line in a few minutes. From there he has a dialog of how machines are not the answer to everything.

Another related episode is describing how the NASA engineers prefer to eat alone in their cubicles without interfacing with other humans because they are preoccupied with their technical problems...very accurate.

He compares the specialists of Mission Control to a professor having at his disposal a room of exports on English writers, poets, etc. There are other humorous examples in the book.

Toward the end of the book he weighs in with a history of how computers work, this at a time when most people's exposure to a computer was a card that said "don't fold, staple or mutilate" in their utility bill. His technical description of computers is very well done, and this is the only book on the subject that gives an accurate enough description of the computers in use at Houston and on the spacecraft that allows you to directly compare them to what we have today in a home computer. (32k of memory, for instance, on the spacecraft computers).

His technical accounts of the moon voyage are accurate and cover interesting detail I do not see by other writers; maybe if you dig into enough NASA documents you might find them. He puts a human face on the whole achievment and gives his opinion of what it all means. I think he was less impressed about it than I was, but this book is the best.

In my quest to collect all of the books written by former Apollo astronauts, I came across this one by Norman Mailer and thought I would give it a try. I never made it to the halfway point of this book. Mailer writes in a very odd fashion; a first person perspective of an imaginary journalist. Uses too many flowery metaphors and innuendo for it to make sense or of any Apollo-related interest. Reads as more of a fictional novel about anything BUT the space program. Skip it.