Return to Earth

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...