“Earthrise” begins with a quotation from William Anders, who, as a member of the first crew to circle the moon, took the photo that gives the book its title and its framework: “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”
Anders’s 1968 image of the delicate blue-and-white-marbled Earth emerging out of the dark, above the slate-gray horizon line of the moon, riveted viewers around the world. It would soon grace the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog, help to inspire Earth Day and focus the ecological awareness of a generation.
Leonard S. Marcus’s challenge was to bring that sense of wonder and discovery to young readers who know the space race only through history books. I am happy to report that he has succeeded in meeting that challenge.
“Earthrise” captures the fast-paced drama of America’s competition with the Soviets to reach the moon, as it recounts the hold-your-breath excitement of those pioneering missions. For young people who love engines and technical detail, it maps how rockets, boosters and stages were crafted for each type of flight. For history buffs, it glides, like a Ken Burns documentary, from a specific topic to the temper of the time. Best of all, it demonstrates the pleasure of browsing through a treasure trove of photographs to reveal the enduring power of a single image.
Marcus puts his knowledge as a historian of illustrated books for children to excellent use here. We see the Earthrise image in color on the cover, and then again in black and white as a frontispiece. Next, we encounter two similar shots: one from the Apollo 11 mission, the other snapped by an unmanned lunar orbiter. Together, the three images announce that this is not just a book about one photo: Steppingstones will lead us to a larger story. As we look at additional space-related artifacts and their captions, the longer written narrative (in effect the audio tour) carries us along. Visual storytelling is a distinct feature of youth nonfiction — and a treat if the author, like Marcus, has an eye for images that will spark interest and keep readers turning the pages.
The tale begins in 1957, with the Soviets’ surprise launch into Earth’s orbit of the first human-built satellite, Sputnik 1, sporting antennas that resemble “cat’s whiskers.” We experience Americans’ fear as the Soviets continue to be one step ahead of us, sending a dog, then a man, then a woman into orbit, and unmanned spacecraft to the moon.
President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 assertion that the United States should commit itself, “before this decade is out,” to “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth” sets a deadline. NASA and its engineers press the limits of technology and skill to accomplish the mission, and are met with danger, failures and tragedy along the way.
Marcus’s smooth prose takes us quickly through the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. A schematic depicts the internal construction of the massive Saturn V rocket, with the first engine powerful enough to hurl astronauts to the moon. There is plenty of human interest as well. We get to know Anders, Frank Borman and James Lovell — the crew of Apollo 8 — as individuals, from boyhood on.
Marcus tracks how the American space program intersected with the social and cultural crosscurrents of the ’60s. He mentions, in a note, the “Mercury 13” — a baker’s dozen of highly capable women who successfully completed a training program and were found to be “as well suited as the men NASA was selecting to crew its space missions, if not more so,” but were not chosen to fly — and cites, through the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., questions that were raised about the value of the space program amid urgent human needs on Earth.
He says enough about these issues to begin a conversation, but he might have gone further, adding material, for example, on why all of NASA’s early “folk heroes” were white and male. And also on why the Soviets were initially so successful yet failed to reach the moon.
Today, political slogans emphasize nativism and boundaries, not connections and shared destinies. But for a brief moment in time, as Marcus reminds us, the Earthrise photo radically shifted our perspective, enabling us to see the fragile beauty of humankind’s home and the critical importance of joining together to protect it.
By the time I finished the book, I couldn’t help thinking of Keats’s sonnet about his changed worldview after reading George Chapman’s English translations of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey”: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken.” Only in this case the planet, seen anew, is Earth.
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