On July 20, 1969, a quiet, determined man from Wapakoneta, Ohio, stepped out of his fragile spacecraft and into history. Neil Armstrong--engineer, naval aviator, test pilot, astronaut and devoted family man--became the first man to walk on the moon. In this powerful, unrelenting biography of a man of no particularly spectacular talent yet who stands as a living testimony to everyday grit and determination, former NASA historian Hansen has achieved something quite remarkable. Like a rich pointillist painting, he has created a magnificent panorama of the second half of the American 20th century by assembling a multitude of luminescent moments in one man's life.
Cross James Merrill, H. P. Lovecraft, and Carlos Castaneda -each imbued with a twenty-first-century aptitude for quantum theory and existential psychology-and you get the voice of Daniel Pinchbeck. And yet, nothing quite prepares us for the lucidity, rationale, and informed audacity of this seeker, skeptic, and cartographer of hidden realms.
Here is a compendium of also-rans and never-made-its. We're talking Betamax, the Sinclair C5, puffball skirts, sporks, the Millennium Dome... and countless other products that never quite cut it.
Intent on having a quiet time by just sitting in a deck chair in his garden, Hamish Macbeth is quite disturbed when a very agitated Elspeth Grant, Loch- dubh's local reporter and astrologer, arrives. It seems that three citizens of nearby Stoyre have moved to Loch- dubh-but they are quite unwilling to offer Elspeth any facts as to why,
