Displaying items by tag: Moon

I’ll be back on Monday with the usual news and reviews here at the site, but today I wanted to do a little something different.

As long time Bits readers will no doubt be aware, every once in a while I review something other than a physical media release. In fact, in the past, I’ve reviewed great books about cinema, film production, and the like.

Some of you may remember that back in 2016, I posted a feature called Stanley Kurbick’s 2001: The Ultimate Trip in Print, covering all of the great books dedicated to the making of Kubrick’s science fiction landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—a piece I then updated in 2023 to cover an additional book on the topic that I thought worth mentioning released in the years since.

Longtime readers will also know that I am a lifelong fan of human spaceflight, and that I’ve reviewed many physical media releases related to the topic, including the films 2001, The Martian (2015), Apollo 13 (1995), and First Man (2018), HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon (1998) dramatic series, and documentaries like Apollo 11 (2019) and For All Mankind (1989).

If you’re interested in human spaceflight, there are of course many great non-fiction books that cover the topic in exhaustive detail, but I would certainly recommend beginning with Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon (1994). (It’s worth noting that this book was the basis for the HBO series I just mentioned.)

But there’s a new book that just arrived in stores last week—and a second book by the same author published a couple of years ago—that I think is absolutely indispensable to anyone interested in humanity’s first voyages beyond the Earth. Published by Black Dog & Leventhal here in the States (part of the Hachette Group) and Particular Books in the UK, Andy Saunders’ Gemini and Mercury Remastered (2025) and Apollo Remastered: The Ultimate Photographic Record (2022) are large and substantial coffee table books. By large, I mean 12 inches by 12 inches each, and by substantial I mean they weigh in at 5.28 and 6.92 pounds respectively. These are serious tomes. [Read on here...]