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Summary: Soon to be a major motion picture!
Review: I heard Homer give a speech the other night. He mentioned Back to the Moon has been optioned by Hollywood. I think this book would make a great movie. It's a great tale, well-written.
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Summary: Huge disappointment after Rocket Boys
Review: A great idea is completely wasted in cliche-ridden tripe. Ex-NASA engineer plots plan to hijack space shuttle and go to the moon to excavate a compound rare on Earth which is the critical link for fusion energy. Meanwhile, the payload specialist on the scheduled flight that is highjacked, Penny High Eagle, falls in love with the protagonist Jack Medaris. Jack pines still for his wife, the niece of Werner von Braun. She has perished a few years earlier in an accident testing a new rocket engine. Part of the Jack's drive to get to the moon is because when his wife was girl she had an astronaut place a canister there with a note inside to her future husband. The characters and plot were tragically pathetic. Dialogue was tortured. Technical descriptions abound and can easily be glossed over. Only by imagining that an exciting story was taking place was I able to finish this drivel. I only picked up Back to the Moon because Rocket Boys was such a wonderful story with vivid characters and heartfelt narrative. We all rooted for Homer in that one. In Back to the Moon, you hardly care for anyone.
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Summary: Shuttle fans....this is a must.....
Review: Spotted this book about 4 days ago...I have almost finished it already tonight. Fun read from start to finish. The author knows his subject inside out and is a great read for any Shuttle fan...or just anyone who enjoys a well written suspense filled story.Compares very well with my other well read Shuttle fiction - Ignition by Kevin Anderson. Hopefully one of these will be a movie one day. Don't history STS freaks..this is for us.
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Summary: One of those "can't put it down" books!
Review: I loved this book. It grabbed me right from the start. Loved Jack Medaris and Penny High Eagle, too. Great, original characters! Highly recommended.
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Summary: Interesting concepts, but cardboard characters
Review: I felt the characters were weakly drawn and their reactions to plot developments pretty formulaic. The plot itself pushed my credibility a bit too much, and resolutions were all too neat. Hickam's purpose in writing this novel is to challenge our failure of imagination in manned space exploration since the Apollo missions. His creative adaptation of well-known shuttle technology to a lunar mission is meant to awaken us to "possibilities."
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Summary: Not science fiction or technothriller but engineer fiction.
Review: Mr. Hickam gave me a sense of reality best expanded from the pages of a book. He asks the very practical question (he's an engineer) "why did we stop?" The Wright brothers and their associates didn't pack it up back in 1904. This kind of novel is important to expand ideas of what can be done. Rather than science fiction or techno-thriller I'd call it an innovative piece of engineering fiction.
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Summary: My husband loves Penny High Eagle!
Review: I have new competition. My husband loves Penny High Eagle. He wants to see the movie with her in it. Who will star as this slinky space girl? Me? I'm wondering about Jack! No, really, this was a good read. We both enjoyed it. Now, we LOVED October Sky but it's a different kind of book.
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Summary: A fun story, well told
Review: I liked it, I really liked it! My husband finished his copy and I picked it up and lo and behold the next thing I knew I was aboard a spacejacked space shuttle and on my way to the moon with a swell fellow, a gorgeous astronette, a big guy good with his hands, and a funny little cat. Really, though, I was enthralled. The book made me laugh sometimes with some of the boy-girl talk but I never lost interest and believe me, when it comes to this kind of book, that's a FIRST!!!!
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Summary: Gosh, I liked this book!!!!!
Review: I took Mr. Hickam's advice and read this book at the beach. In fact, at Cedar Key, one of the many colorful locales mentioned in the book. I was captivated from the start. If you like techno-thrillers (and I think this is the key to why there's been some bad reviews here - you need to like the genre) Hickam has out-Clancyed Clancy and all the rest of them. Read this novel just for pleasure but you'll also learn a whole lot about people who work at NASA and what they really think about the astronauts, etc. Astronauts are not always heroes.
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Summary: What a book !!!!
Review: This promises to be one of this summer's page turners! The story is taken right out of today's (and tomorrow's) headlines and delivers on every page. NASA insider Hickam weaves an entertaining and captivating techno-tale that reads as if Clive Cussler and Arthur C. Clarke had co-written the book with Bill Nye the Science Guy and Rube Goldberg. Keith Cowing, editor NASA Watch
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