Morton is a science writer and this is the moon from every angle at once: how it formed and why that mattered for life here, what Apollo was as a political project, the geology of a dead world and what the samples told us. Then the long strange history of the moon in imagination — the fiction, the hoaxes, the paintings — and finally the present push to go back, the water at the poles, and who thinks they’ll own it. He’s good on the emotional fact underneath it all: A generation watched people walk up there and then nobody went again for fifty years.
The Moon