By Roberta Edwards
The whole life of the first person to walk on the moon, from a model-plane-building farm boy to the man who said the famous words.
It's the full story of Neil Armstrong, told in short chapters a newly independent reader can manage. A boy on an Ohio farm who builds model planes and earns his pilot's license before he can drive, then a Navy flier, a test pilot pushing experimental jets, and finally the astronaut who steps onto the moon in July 1969 and says the line every child eventually learns. Little side-boxes fill in the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, and the rest of the space race, with over eighty black-and-white drawings throughout.
It turns a space-obsessed child's hero into a real, readable life, and it's built for exactly the child who's ready to try a chapter book but still wants the facts they crave. The short chapters and constant pictures keep a new independent reader moving, and the format is a gateway drug, because the Who Was shelf holds hundreds more once this one lands.