NASA had not vetted their text. At Mission Control, the brass was stunned, yet moved. My mother gasped. This moment — this respite from conflict and despair — still shimmers in my memory, brighter than Neil Armstrong’s historic moonwalk. Even fierce space program critics like Leonard Bernstein were struck by it. During Borman’s reading, the novelist William Styron later recalled, there was a “depthless and inexpressible” look on Bernstein’s face.

For people who were not alive in 1968 — or kids whose dads did not chart the craft’s every move on a family bulletin board — Robert Kurson’s “Rocket Men” is a riveting introduction to the flight. The book takes off when Apollo’s massive launch vehicle, the Saturn V, rises — an experience like “watching the Empire State Building leave Earth.”

Kurson details the mission in crisp, suspenseful scenes, interspersed with quieter history-driven chapters. The astronauts were not prepared for the ferocity of blastoff. In the ground-based flight simulator, they had modeled all manner of disasters, including fatal ones. “Dying helped the men learn to survive,” Kurson writes. But the mock-up never replicated the roar, the shuddering or the G-forces of the real thing.

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Nor were they prepared for their own frailty; they were test pilots in top physical shape. But several hours into the mission, Borman suddenly vomited and had a bout of explosive diarrhea — too extensive to be either contained or cleaned up. The waste particles, reminders of their humanness, would travel with them. When the capsule splashed down in the Pacific, a rescuer poked his head in and recoiled — because, he told the men, of “the way you smelled.”