Simon & Schuster R164,95
Some 37 years ago, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. It was 50 years, to the month, from Louis Bleriot's first cross-Channel flight in 1909; an achievement, in its time, nearly as wondrous.
There were just 12 men in total who walked on the moon, on the six flights between July 1969 and December 1972, when the Apollo programme ended.
Now, in this first authorised biography, we learn about the doubts and fears of those who planned and participated in this amazing venture, as well as some of the less serious issues.
Taking those first, why did Armstrong leave out the indefinite article in his famous phrase: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind?"
At the time, his wife Janet joked that Armstrong had taken so long to exit the lunar module after landing on the moon's surface "because Neil's trying to decide about the first words he's going to say".
But the distillation of nearly three pages on the subject of this missing "a" (remember, this is US-style biography where every little irrelevancy is endlessly dissected) comes down to Neil saying he guessed he just forgot the "a". So now you know, if you ever cared.
More serious was the fear that the lunar orbiter might disappear in a great drift of moon dust, a veritable lunar quicksand.
Certainly Neil's mother, Viola, "was worried that they might sink in too deep" as she watched the TV at her home and waited to hear the definitive words from Tranquility Base: "The Eagle has landed."
As we now know, the moon's surface was so compact that Armstrong's companion, Buzz Aldrin, was only able to hammer his core sampling tube a mere 15cm or so into the ground.
In his 650 pages, Hansen takes us through Armstrong's formative years, his training and combat experience as a fighter pilot, his selection for training as an astronaut and the lead-in to the lift-off of the Apollo 11 flight from Cape Canaveral.
It was a supremely logical, coherent career. A career that produced not some "right stuff" air jockey, but a highly qualified, quick-thinking technical expert who could be guaranteed always to make the right - or at least the best - decision at the right time.
Norman Mailer's book Of a Fire on the Moon, published in the same year as the Apollo 11 mission, is a brilliant, elegiac evocation of its significance written without the benefit of any interviews or even a meeting between the writer and his subject. Ultimately, however, Armstrong's character escaped Mailer.
Trying to uncover the "real" Armstrong, Mailer wondered about the humourless, slightly pedantic exactitude he displayed, his denial of the role of intuition, his engineer's belief that everything could be measured - and that what could not, didn't much matter.
Was Armstrong a simple innocent, or was there something subtly sinister in his "gentle, remote air" as he answered reporters' questions before the mission?
Mailer's mission was to "decode" Armstrong and, in the end, he failed. Mailer, writes Hansen, instead "conjured the makings of his own Armstrong".
For "Mailer really did not care about Armstrong, the man, on a personal level, only as a vessel into which the author could pour his own mental energy and profundity".
And that's why this rather more stolid, as well as solid, book is ultimately the one on which we should rely.
Of course, even after reading First Man you might wish to believe the whole Apollo programme was a gigantic fake. There are various Internet sites devoted to proving this unlikely thesis.
They're entertaining, but with a kook rating on a level (geddit?) with the flat-earth society (find this - or perhaps not - at www.flat-earth.org).
There have been a film, a video, and a singularly unpleasant Fox TV "documentary" suggesting that Armstrong and his associates were involved in the deaths of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee in that tragic fire during a 1967 launch simulation.
Ah yes, the Internet. On his 70th birthday, Armstrong received a belligerent letter from a teacher charging that "everyone knows the whole saga was faked, and the evidence is there for all to see".
Suggesting that Armstrong, as a pensioner in his presumed dotage, might not regularly surf the 'Net, the writer kindly pointed him in the right direction.
The first man on the moon forwarded this onslaught to Nasa, which now responds to similar missives with a form letter stating, among other things, that "Mr Armstrong believes that the only thing more difficult to achieve than the lunar flights would be to successfully fake them".
Hey, the stolid old engineer has a sense of humour after all!