Andrew Chaikin Audiobooks

A Man on the Moon remains the standard account of Apollo, told through the men who flew

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Who is Andrew Chaikin?

Andrew Chaikin, born in 1956, is an American author, speaker and science journalist with an unusually close relationship to his subject. He grew up in Great Neck, New York, studied geology at Brown University, and while still a student worked at the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Viking programme – not a bad apprenticeship for the man who would go on to write the standard account of Apollo.

That account is A Man on the Moon, his detailed history of the Apollo missions, which formed the basis of the twelve-part HBO series From the Earth to the Moon. He served as executive editor for space and science at Space.com from 1999 to 2001, spent time on the faculty at Montana State University, and in 2013 wrote and performed the narration for a NASA video recreating the taking of the famous Earthrise photograph during Apollo 8. He lives in Vermont.

Andrew Chaikin in audiobooks

Our catalogue carries A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, and if a listener chooses only one space history, it should probably be this one. The subtitle gives the game away: this is the story of the people who flew, not merely the machines that carried them, told with the detail of a journalist who has spent a lifetime close to the programme.

In audio it becomes an expedition in its own right – long, absorbing, and with a built-in sense of wonder, ideal for UK listeners who like their non-fiction epic in scale. Few subjects reward hours of attention like Apollo, and few tellings have earned more trust than Chaikin’s.