Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger

 

Title: Apollo 13

Author:  Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger

Narrated by:  Fred Sanders

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Length: Approximately 16 hours and 15 minutes

Source: Review Copy from Simon & Schuster Audio.  Thank you @simonandschuster #BookClubFavorites for the free books!

 

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We have spent long weekends this year traveling around and touring colleges. Our oldest son is a senior and he wants to be an aerospace engineer.  We all enjoy history and decided on the college tour drives it would be perfect to listen to Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger.

Apollo 13 is an excellent movie, but this book fills in all of the details that can’t possibly fit into a movie.  It gives the background of the Apollo program and of the astronauts that were aboard Apollo 13.  They were supposed to be the third mission of astronauts that walked on the moon, but instead an oxygen tank explosion ended their mission and left them scrambling for their lives.  Together with support from numerous NASA personnel below, they had to work together to come up with a solution that would ultimately bring them safely home.

Fred Sanders was a good narrator.  Apollo 13 was an intriguing non-fiction tale.  Whenever I turned it off to talk to my husband, my oldest son requested that it be turned back on again.  This was the story of Apollo 13 told in third person from Jim Lovell, Marilyn Lovell, and ground control’s point of view.  It was amazing how many things went wrong, yet they all kept calmly solving the problems and carrying on.  It is a very inspiring story. This is a great book for anyone interested in the space program.