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For anyone interested in the story of the astronauts who went to the moon, Moondust is a great read. In the early 2000s (if I remember right), the author travel

• philomath_mn 3y ago
  Great recommendation!
• JKCalhoun 3y ago
  I read that one and it was excellent. The author talks also about the times, the era of the moon landings — and he had an interesting aside in the book that stuck with me about Elvis Presley (of all people): ---- snip ---- Always Elvis-sceptic, I once asked the photographer Alfred Wertheimer, one of the last to be allowed real access to the singer, why the girls in the crowd were crying—whether the tears were part of an act. He told me: “Well, I think it was the fact that we’d been through this rigid Eisenhower era. Everything was cutsie-pie crinoline skirts and ‘How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?’; the girls knew their place and they weren’t women’s libbers yet; everything was very tightly organized. Then along comes a guy like Elvis ... he’d go onstage into a darkened auditorium, where there would be maybe 4,000 people — mostly young ladies, a few boys and then a few police, who were there just to make sure nothing ‘dirty’ was happening. From the very start, Elvis is focused on the girls and they’re in love with his hair and the way he curls his lip. And he talks to them and then he begins to sing and he lets it all hang out. His hair, which was immaculate, starts coming down and the sweat comes down—and do you think he stops to mop his brow or sweep his hair back up? No. He gets down on his knees, then gets back up: he is so revealing, so unconscious of his own body movements that all of a sudden the girls look at each other, after all the years of holding everything in, and they cry. “They’re not putting it on the way you’d see girls doing in later years: they’re not screaming or jumping up and down, just holding each other and crying.” ---- snip ----