Buzz Aldrin's courageous, inspiring account of fame and depression following Apollo 11 When Buzz Aldrin returned victorious from the Apollo 11 mission as one of the first men to have walked on the moon, he didn't realize that, in other ways, his odyssey had just begun. "There was a jolt as the small drogue chutes opened," Aldrin relates in the opening passages of Return to Earth, remembering his abrupt descent into the gravity of the blue planet. "We landed with all the grace of a freight elevator." And with that atmospheric splash, Aldrin and coauthor Wayne Warga take us on a journey through the human side of the space program as the astronaut learns to cope with the sudden pressures of being a lionized public persona. In honest, stripped-away prose, Aldrin reveals a side of instant fame for which neither West Point nor NASA could have ever prepared him. One minute a fighter pilot and engineer, the next a cultural icon burdened with the adoration of thousands, Aldrin gives a candid account of the depression that resulted from trying to be too many things to too many people, leading the astronaut to later remark, "I traveled to the moon, but the most significant voyage of my life began when I returned from where no man had been before." Speaking openly about the affair that threatened his marriage and the concerns that plagued him upon returning from the historic mission, Aldrin pens a compelling memoir that also serves as an excellent guide for those times in life when power and success conspire to corrupt even the best of us.
"A frank, sometimes poignant depiction of [Buzz Aldrin's] descent from fame into alcoholism and a depression . . . as much about what followed his moon voyage as what preceded it."
The New York Times Book Review
"Distills the worldview-in space and on Earth-of this American icon."
