The Last Man on the Moon; Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America's Race in Space

New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2000. First St. Martin's Griffin Edition [stated]. First Printing [stated]. Trade paperback. Good. xii, 356 pages. Illustrations. Index. Cover has slight wear and soiling. Corners of several pages creased. Eugene Andrew Cernan (March 14, 1934 - January 16, 2017) was an American astronaut, naval aviator, electrical engineer, aeronautical engineer, and fighter pilot. During the Apollo 17 mission, Cernan became the eleventh person to walk on the moon and, as he re-entered the lunar module after Harrison Schmitt on their third and final lunar excursion, is the last person to have walked on the Moon.
Cernan traveled into space three times; as pilot of Gemini 9A in June 1966, as lunar module pilot of Apollo 10 in May 1969, and as commander of Apollo 17 in December 1972, the final Apollo lunar landing. Cernan was also a backup crew member of the Gemini 12, Apollo 7 and Apollo 14 space missions. In 1999, with co-author Donald A. Davis, he published his memoir The Last Man on the Moon, which is about his naval and NASA career. Derived from a Kirkus review: An autobiography of American astronaut and moon-walker Cernan. Cernan commanded the last of the Apollo missions, number 17, destination Moon, where he and mission geologist Jack Schmitt took a walk. It was a long haul of a career to make those few steps—in all likelihood, a career exquisitely nuanced, serendipitous, and with a few tales to tell. He hits a stride chronicling his space walk on an earlier mission—a truly hellacious, slow-motion episode, in which a welter of little glitches nearly kills him—and his profiles of the other pilots in the space program are easily the most entertaining parts of the book. When he steps off the ladder of the lunar module and treads upon the surface of the Moon, he stays true to form—no poetry, just "Oh, my golly.".