100 books like The Last Man on the Moon

This is one book I couldn’t put down. Even though Michael Collins might be considered one of the "forgotten” astronauts (as the lone astronaut from the seminal Apollo 11 mission who didn’t get to land on the moon), his book provides an amazing and amusing look at what it’s like to be an astronaut.

His conversational writing style is engaging, witty, and insightful, and I loved his self-deprecating humor. I classify this book as the best astronaut biography ever written and Collins as one of the most endearing icons in history.

This book is written by two dear friends who are the reason I am a published author myself. However, I don’t recommend it just because they are close to me, but because it is a wonderful book that kicked off the entire Outward Odyssey series, of which my book is a part. This magnificent book set a new standard for historical work on space exploration by focusing on the people instead of the hardware. The stories you’ll read here will show you why we are who we are and why humans will always strive for the unknown.

This book pulls together three things that I love in fiction: big ideas, compelling characters, and a plot that keeps you guessing.

The big ideas really are “big” ones: What’s the nature of consciousness? How do memories create or distort our sense of identity? And how does our physical biology as “creatures” determine our inner psychology?

As for the city of Winnipeg itself, the novel leverages it in all kinds of ways. One example: A riot after a Winnipeg Jets hockey game leads to such national violence that the US President calls for an invasion of Canada to “help” restore order.

And, in one of the novel’s prescient plot points, this US invasion prompts Vladimir Putin to plan his own attack (keep in mind that this book was published six years before Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine!). 

Crossfield wrote one of the first books about what it means to be a test pilot of a powerful rocket plane, and I consider it the best. This book is an autobiography that delves into the nature of the personality of someone who can climb into the cockpit of an experimental aircraft, light off the engines, and climb high into the desert sky at multiples of the speed of sound. It also is the book that began my deeply personal 30-year journey to write my own book on the North American X-15. Scotty was one of the first pilots I spoke to in order to get insights into how these people think and react. I know you’ll enjoy meeting him through his book as much as I did sitting with him in person.

Those who know me, understand that Arthur C. Clarke has been my favorite author for as long as I can remember, and they would probably be surprised at my pick of this novel over his most well-known book 2001: A Space Odyssey or even Childhood’s End. Let me put it this way, I’ll recommend anything written by Clarke, but this book stands out for me because of its profound look at the far future of humanity, which has fallen nearly to the point of extinction. It is a work that serves as a warning to us all, but also shows how one person can change the trajectory of an entire society, bringing it back from the brink in order to move once again among the stars.

You’ll find a thousand books that tell the Apollo story, describing the missions and the astronauts and the drama, and A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin is most people’s gateway drug. It’s a great book. But being on the technical side myself–and needing all those messy in-depth technical details to get my own book right–I found Woods’ book perfect for delving deep into the scientific and technical ingenuity of the missions, of all the procedures and maneuvers from launch through splashdown, and many other fascinating aspects that other books leave out. If you’ve ever read an Apollo history and wondered: “But how did that really work, how long did it take, what was the process, why did they do it that way?” or even just “Uh, they did what, now?” then this is totally the book for you.

Haynes Manuals: they’re not just for cars anymore. Haynes also publishes books dedicated to the technical details of planes you’ll never own or service, and spacecraft you’ll never fly in. They’re detailed, they’re technical, and they’re geek gold. With a million color pictures and cutaway diagrams, and text crammed with comprehensive engineering details, the Haynes' Apollo 13 volume is a perfect companion to my Woods pick, or a great standalone in getting literally beneath the skin of the Apollo spacecraft and seeing exactly how all the moving parts worked. By all means buy the Haynes' Apollo 11 Manual too (I did), but I think this one has the edge in terms of technical depth–and you obviously get the full backstory of this aborted and almost disastrous Lost Moon mission too.

As a break from the two hardcore technical volumes above, my next pick is a coffee table book stuffed with awesome historical photos and graphics, that tells the story of the Apollo Program in a more straightforward and traditional fashion, but also delves into the politics, the science of what we learned about lunar geology, and so on. There’s no shortage of big glossy Apollo books, but for my money this is the most complete and absorbing, and has all the best pictures. 

This is, hands down, the single best book about the Apollo Moon missions ever written.

Comprehensive, accurate, and utterly engrossing, Chaikin takes you back to the 1960s and 70s and to the Moon to tell the story about how humans visited their first alien world.

Far and away my favorite book on the topic — and as we begin the journey to go back to the Moon, a great time to read up on when we did it first.

The book interweaves the human story of risk and decision-making and the technological account of successes and failures of onboard computing in the Apollo program. It makes a fascinating comparison with the parallel story of techno-human systems in the Soviet space program explored in my book. While Soviet cosmonauts routinely served as a backup for automatics, American astronauts successfully fought to seize control of their missions from the computer and to perform manually each of the lunar landings.