First, I think everybody and their second cousin is at BEA. Next year I'm going! I swear!!
I'm finishing up my July column for Bookslut today (June is "Surviving Highschool", July is all nonfiction) and just wrote about Team Moon by Catherine Thimmesh. This is an oversized heavily illustrated book about the 400,000 people who contributed to the success of Apollo 11. Obviously it does not include information on each and every one of those folks, but it does mention alot of the people who had jobs that most of us don't think about when we consider the moon landing. I never gave the space suits a second thought, or how hard it was to design them, or who trained the astronauts to take photos without using a viewfinder or all the other bazillion little things that went into planning for the launch. The photographs she selected to use are great also - a shot of people at a sidewalk cafe in Milan all clustered around a small television set is particularly cool - and it is clear that Thimmesh was determined to make this book both relevant and interesting. It would be a shame if it dies a little death in the YA section and all the adult space geeks out there (and I'm proudly one of them) never even know that it existed. It's really a gorgeous book and impressed me a great deal.
Other titles in the Nonfiction column include an artist's autobiography, a graphic novel biography of an environmentalist, a history book about Reconstruction and another one about the Bronx zoo. Quite a mix, don't you think?
May 22
2006
10:43 AM
Sounds like a really good book; I'll have to add it to my list.