First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (2006)
Simon & Schuster

Description

On July 20, 1969, the world stood still to watch thirty-eight-year-old American astronaut Neil A. Armstrong become the first person to step on the surface of another heavenly body. Perhaps no words in human history became better known than those few he uttered at that historic moment. In a penetrating exploration of American hero worship, Hansen addresses the complex legacy of the First Man, as an astronaut and an individual.

Reviews

9.0 Publishers Weekly

In this powerful, unrelenting biography of a man of no particularly spectacular talent yet who stands as a living testimony to everyday grit and determination, former NASA historian Hansen has achieved something quite remarkable. Like a rich pointillist painting, he has created a magnificent panorama of the second half of the American 20th century by assembling a multitude of luminescent moments in one man's life. From Armstrong's birth to a middle-class family in Ohio to the mind-boggling fame of the Apollo 11 triumph, and later his service on the commission investigating the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster, Hansen details it all.
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9.0 National Space Society | Leonard David

First Man is a blunt and frank look into Armstrong's personal trajectory that catapulted him into hero-astronaut status. This book is the first-ever authorized biography, masterfully written by James Hansen, a professor of history at Auburn University in Alabama.
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8.0 Amazon user reviews

A comprehensive, and first-authorized, biography of one of the most famous personages in world history. That's quite a claim but when you consider more people can quote Neil Armstrong than Shakespeare, it's not without merit. Considering Neil Armstrong has led what many people consider to be a "reclusive" life post-moon landing (relative to Lindbergh's experience), this book opens the door to an otherwise elusive person.
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8.0 The Space Review | Jeff Foust

Given that Armstrong himself has called First Man a "great book", according to Hansen, it seems clear that Hansen did succeed, or at least came far closer to describing the real Armstrong than anyone else to date. While this book is not the last word on Armstrong—and one hopes that the final chapter of Armstrong's life is not written for many years to come—it provides a far better picture of Armstrong the man, rather than Armstrong the icon
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8.0 New York Times | Douglas Brinkley

Hansen interviewed Armstrong for 50 hours in preparing "First Man," a fine authorized biography brimming with groundbreaking research, fresh anecdotes and fair-minded analysis.
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6.0 bookreporter.com | Robert Finn

James R. Hansen, a history professor at Auburn University and a former NASA historian, has tried in this book to get at his subject by unearthing every possible detail of his life, no matter how trivial, and spilling the whole accumulation onto his pages --- 648 of them and another 60-plus pages of notes and a vast bibliography. It is a valiant effort, but is only intermittently successful.
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