By Sam Leith
The computer on which I'm writing this review has a 500GB hard disk and a 2.33GHz quad-core processor. The computers which, in 1969, sent three astronauts safely to the moon and back had 74KB of memory and processors with a clock speed of 2.048MHz.
There are two conclusions I draw from this. The first is that the bloke in customer services at Dell may have got away with selling me something a little overspecified for my requirements.
The second is that Buzz Aldrin and his fellow Apollo astronauts - travelling into outer space with the sort of technology that now would seem low-spec for a digital watch - had cojones like freakin' coconuts.
As Aldrin describes, they ended up landing the lunar module manually (the computer had wanted to put them down in a field littered with boulders and a crater). That meant travelling at 65km/h above the lunar surface in a flying bean can, peering out of a tiny window to judge where to land that wouldn't kill them. They put down with less than 20 seconds of fuel left.
The rest really is history. Whatever conspiracy theorists may claim (Aldrin includes a satisfying account of punching one of them), Neil Armstrong climbed out of the lunar module and walked on the surface of the moon. Not long afterwards, so did his colleague, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin.
The opening section of Aldrin's memoir, then, tells a story often told: but one not diminished in the retelling - starting with the striking detail of giant shards of frost peeling, pre-lift-off, in the warm Florida morning, from the superchilled liquid oxygen tanks on their rocket.
The book takes its title from what he said when asked to describe what he saw on the moon: "Beautiful. Beautiful. Magnificent desolation."
The bulk of Magnificent Desolation struggles to live up to its first few chapters. But how could it be otherwise? It describes a man whose life has struggled to live up to its first couple of chapters.
Painfully, the very aspects of Aldrin's character that brought him to that early achievement - singlemindedness, competitiveness, ego - seem to be the ones that made it harder for him to outlive it.
After he returned from the moon, his marriage started to disintegrate. He suffered from depression and alcoholism - illnesses for which men of his type and generation seldom sought help. His bravery in doing so, and talking publicly about it, damaged his military and business careers.
It was harder, on top of that, for Aldrin. He downplays the difficulties he had with his father, but was troubled by their relationship. Aldrin snr was a ramrod-necked Air-Force lifer who pushed his son hard, withheld praise and didn't think real men saw shrinks.
What did it mean, though, to be always the second man on the moon? Aldrin seeks to be gracious about what was evidently a sore point. He was hurt when he went with Armstrong and Mike Collins to unveil an Apollo 11 commemorative postage stamp and its caption read First Man on the Moon: "Our being there felt like we were back-up singers for Elvis," he said.
He describes how before the mission he asked other astronauts who they thought would or should go first - Nasa protocol would have put Aldrin on the moon first, but Armstrong was the commanding officer.
"Word soon got around that I was trying to lobby support for my being the first to set foot on the moon's surface?? That wasn't the case. I was simply behaving like a competitive Air Force fighter pilot would."
His dad was more straightforward. After the stamp incident, he picketed the White House with a placard reading "My Son Was First, Too".
There's a certain bleak comedy to the way in which Aldrin - though you feel there would surely have been a therapeutic value to his doing something different - remains locked in orbit around his early achievement.
At once preening, and poignantly self-reassuring, is the frequency with which he describes himself - or quotes others describing him - as "a hero" or "an American hero".
He describes, in passing, the "moon decor" of the Aldrin family home in the early 1970s, including a life-size blow-up of the famous "visor shot" of Aldrin on the moon, and the "Moon Room" with its well-stocked bar. As a consequence of that bar, Aldrin checked into hospital to be treated for alcoholism. The receptionist asked for his mother's maiden name. "I'll give you a hint," he said. "It begins with an m and ends with an o. It's Moon! I've been there."
When he proposed to his third and current wife, Lois, he said: "I thought, for a wedding ring, I might get you a moon rock."
He didn't get her a moon rock - all moon rock, apparently, belongs to the US government. But once reporters picked up on the notion, he says: "I spent months trying to convince Federal officials that I did not possess any lunar material."
They wed to the strains of Fly Me to the Moon, and in his speech Buzz quoted "a phrase I heard from a guy I took a trip with. He said: 'One small step'. Seems to me Lois and I have launched a giant leap."
Aldrin comes across in these sometimes stilted pages - the author had the good sense to employ a ghostwriter but not, unfortunately, one who can write - as a nice, uncomplicated guy. He is excited by fame: Gina Lollobrigida, Clint Eastwood, Walter Cronkite, Arthur C Clarke, John Travolta and others pass through these pages.
It's not fair, though, to picture Aldrin as a man coasting on his lunar history. He was a decorated pilot in the Korean War before he was an astronaut. After the Apollo missions, he headed the US Air Force's facility for test pilots.
His subsequent career has had its indignities - flogging lawnmowers; gooning around with Buzz Lightyear dolls; submitting to ridicule from Ali G ("Was you ever jealous of Louis Armstrong?").
But he was and remains an advocate for sending more people into space. He has lobbied Congress for funding, patented ideas for space buses and shuttles to Mars, and joined the rapper Snoop Dogg to commend the "Rocket Experience" to youngsters in song.
Of course, there are problems enough on Earth without pouring all that money into space travel. But, as Aldrin argues, there is a value, incalculably diffusive, to the sense of wonder the moon landings instilled in millions of lives.
And still. Look up, and think of it for a moment. Long after we are all dead and buried, Buzz Aldrin's mark will still be there, orbiting in its monotonous sublime: a footprint in the changeless dust on the surface of the moon. - Daily Mail