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Rating: In July 1969, Fallaci, who gives us this precious "live" testimony of the moon landing, has just turned forty and is at the peak of her maturity as a journalist and writer. A passionate and fervent reporter, her account has not lost its relevance precisely due to the solid documentation sensed behind every statement: even more remarkable considering that in those years there was no internet support and only direct personal research, verifying sources in the field, could give historical authority to every journalistic statement.
In this book, for those of my generation who had experienced the stages of the American space race as a heroic pursuit of the "good" Americans, her demystifying descriptions of the astronauts, for whom the Apollo mission was not much different from the combat operations those same men had conducted in Korea a few years before, still strike today. And bringing us back to contemporaneity, Fallaci never forgets, while we were all there monitoring the launch of Apollo, the journey and the moon landing, in Vietnam - where she had also been for a long time as a war correspondent - the fighting continued: “The last little soldier charging a trench, the last Vietcong throwing himself against a tank, is a thousand times braver than the astronauts going to the Moon”.
Not for this does she miss the epicness of the moment (“it would take Homer to describe what I see!”) and in the book's incipit, her words are filled with emphasis describing the cyclopean dimension of the launch pad: a rocket of “height equivalent to a thirty-six-floor skyscraper”. She becomes more prosaic when describing the risks for Earth from the contamination of “something lunar” that might escape scientists' control, but today - who would have thought - these allusions to an unknown virus have returned to surprising relevance.
Two more observations among many possible aside the main theme. The first concerns Von Braun, the brilliant designer of the Saturn rocket, but with a past connected to the Nazi V2s on London, of which Fallaci highlights the embarrassment in responding to a German journalist's question, requested in his mother tongue. The second is a semantic note and an indirect lesson against hypocrisy: “There are no niggers at NASA” writes Fallaci in the preface and then again highlights “the poor niggers” protesting in front of the gates of Cape Kennedy; today we would write African-Americans, but in many ways, the substance would not be different.
THAT DAY ON THE MOON therefore reveals itself to be much more than a celebratory instant book for a unique event in human history and still speaks to us effectively and makes us reflect. Even though - due to a certain aggressiveness and presumption of hers that have intensified over the years - I never loved her much, Fallaci gives us here an example of great journalism without genuflection. Recommended for the young who were not there and for all those who dreamed of being astronauts as children.
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