Full Moon

Rating:
Summary: an excellent anniversary present
Review: I bought the book as a present for my husband since he is into space and photography, and the image quality and subjects were so good the book caught me up as well! These photos should have been made public sooner, is all I can say.

Rating:
Summary: The Next Best Thing to Being There
Review: Don't let the relatively high price of this book put you off. It's pictures cover all phases of a trip to the Moon and back, and show numerous images of all the places where humans have set down on the lunar surface. Features of the Moon that you may have only heard about before, like scarps and rilles, are suddenly there before your eyes. Many of the pictures are in color, which makes the bleakness of the Moon stand out all the more. If you want the best idea one can possibly get of what it's like to stand on the Moon, look no further.

Rating:
Summary: Full Moon
Review: A voyage to the Moon & back: a stunning, mysterious, elegant sequence of 145 photographs-most of them never before published-selected from 32,000 taken by the Apollo astronauts & preserved in the NASA archives. Chosen by Michael Light & arranged to show us a composite voyage, infinitely more immediate & moving than any special-effects simulation we have seen, these breathtaking photographs reveal the experience of space travel in all its audacious splendor. Here is the baptism by fire at liftoff; the vertiginous experience of space-walking; the utterly incomparable emptiness of the lunar landscape. We see the Moon's surface irrevocably changed by the arrival of men & their equipment; & the glowing blue ball of Earth, indescribably beautiful at such enormous physical & psychological distance. Wonderful in the truest sense of the word, Full Moon makes astronauts of us all, allowing us to see one of the most extraordinary journeys of all time through the eyes of the men who made it.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome!
Review: All the photographs you see in this book were taken by astronauts. Some are funny, some are strange, some are in color but all are astonishing. William Anders took one of the most famous of the pictures, Earthrise over the Moon. James McDivitt's shots of Edward White's spacewalk will leave you breathless. Alfred Worden's shots are some of the best. This is a book well worth the money. You will find yourself raptly viewing each and every one.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, almost impressionistic chronicle
Review: FULL MOON is the perfect gift to give to the friend who still believes NASA faked the moon landings. This beautiful coffee-table book weaves 129 images from the Apollo missions into a chronological super-mission, from liftoff to moon landing to splashdown. Only a few of these images are familiar, but a lot of them are not, and the book's large format brings out the details these images deserve. The pictures manage to show the moon as an otherworldly region of bright light and harsh shadows, a land so grey that the brief flashes of color - the gold foil of the lunar lander or the red knob on the rover - stand out as if they were hand-colored. After paging through those sections, you can catch a brief understanding of the relief the astronauts felt at seeing the earth with its blues and greens and browns.

Accompanying the images are a couple of essays that go into detail about the cameras and film used, and the difficulties the astronauts faced in getting the images, as well as how Light picked and chose among the thousands of images taken.

Regarding the one-star review criticizing the selection of images, I can agree with the reviewer, but this book is still worth having. I was overcome with the large size of the photos and the world it reveals. It's as close as I'll ever come to walking the skin of the moon, and it reveals the fragility of the spacecraft, and the heroism - the true heroism - of men who risked their lives in them, on an almost visceral level.

Rating:
Summary: Spectacular, unusual and a bit disappointing
Review: The good news is, this huge beautiful book does present some of the most amazing pictures from the Apollo program in grandeur. The best of this book are the multiple fold out four-panel composites, giving a beautifully panoramic view of scenes usually presented in single frames. They give a spectacular perspective of the lunar landscape and are extremely effective.

What's just as amazing about this book is what's been left out.
Especially since there are at least 40 empty black pages begging for all of your favourite Apollo images. This would have been the ultimate book to publish a full frame view of Neil Armstrong's classic picture of Buzz Aldrin on the surface. Where is Bill Anders' Apollo 8 Earthrise in color ? Also missing, in my opinion, are some of the fabulous splashdown and re-entry pictures, and those of the mighty Saturn V. A great book, but it could easily have been so much better.

Rating:
Summary: A major disappointment. Not the definitive Apollo album.
Review: Misled by glowing reviews into buying this book, I opened it with anticipation, which slowly turned to disappointment. Other reviewers have mentioned the poor quality of some images (blurred), but worse for me is the poor choice of images. It attempts to present a sequence from launch to splashdown, but misses out on images that would clearly show what happened. No launch, apart from a few grainy blowups of flames that I must presume came from a rocket, no splashdown, just a picture of a choppy sea out the window. Worst insult was presenting the famous 'earthrise' image in black-and-white. The whole point of that image comes from the color of earth against the grey of the moon. Whatever Michael Light's skills as an artist, he has none as an editor/collator. Perhaps he only had access to the pics that Nasa didn't want to keep. I had hoped for the definitive coffee-table book of beautiful images documenting this most wonderful of journeys. This isn't it. I'm still searching.

Rating:
Summary: You'll want to frame it and hang it on your wall
Review: As a graphic artist I know great printing when I see it. This book represents some of the best black and white photo printing I have ever seen in a book. It is great as a coffee table book (your guests wont be able to put it down without seeing every page), and it is even better as a centerpiece to your bookshelf. Michael Light has true talent as a digital artist by beautifully restoring and sharpening these historical photos of the NASA Apollo missions. I look forward to picking up a copy of his other book '100 Suns' in which he restores what were once classified military images of above-ground nuclear weapons tests. I am confident I will be as satisfied with it as I am with 'Full Moon.'