The Books Briefing: One Small Step That Opened a Lifetime of Wonder

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, which revealed a new visual perspective of humans’ home planet, set in the deep suspension of a newly documented outer space. The fiction writer Don DeLillo incorporated that image into a short story, in which one character aboard an orbiting space station becomes transfixed by the look of Earth at a distance. The astronaut Chris Hadfield took thousands of photographs during his own, real-life orbit, which he published in a book for people who may never get to enjoy the same view.