Ben Mezrich (a previously published author of 11 books) has written Sex
on the Moon (ISBN 978-0-434-02079-9, Random House, 2011), and I suppose
it goes with the old adage ‘sex sells’, well in this case the cover caught
my eye amongst the hundreds of titles in my local Bookazine. Sex does sell!
The plot runs around a young American Mormon who is
kicked out of the church and his family’s home for having pre-marital sex.
The offender, young Thad, then moves in with his girlfriend and with no real
ideas about his future, decides that he wants to be an astronaut.
Readers who are old enough will remember the strip
cartoon Charles Atlas advertisements where the weakling has sand kicked in
his face, but after a Charles Atlas course he lets the bully have what he
deserves. Did any 97 lb sand kicking weakling ever believe those ads? I
really doubt it. However, in this book, the hero Thad changes from a timid
failed Mormon to someone who would carry out a heist of priceless moon
rocks. That a clever young man would be able to work out how to do this is
quite credible, but that he would be able to shrug off the morality of it
all, with his Mormon background, is not so credible.
However, the story is reputedly true, and author Mezrich
notes at the beginning of the book that it is a “narrative account based on
multiple interviews, numerous sources, and thousands of pages of court
documents. He does point out that the story is written from Thad’s point of
view, without Author Mezrich actually endorsing them himself.
You are led through the actual robbery by Thad, and this
showed just how lax security at a NASA base really is/was. The plan was not
brilliant, but was successful because of the poor security.
Of course, to make it all worthwhile, Thad has to sell
the moon rocks he has stolen, and he finds himself with a spaced-out
drop-out, who trawls the internet, looking for a buyer, and amazingly, does
come up with someone in Belgium who expresses interest.
Unfortunately for Thad and his space-monkey Gordon, this
all comes to the notice of the FBI, which mounts a ‘catch or destroy’
mission, with tens of agents and police, complete overkill with this bunch
of amateurs, led by Thad the dreamer, Thad the totally immature, thinking he
was giving his girlfriend a present that no one else had done on Planet
Earth. A trip into fantasyland for a young girl he had known for less than a
month.
Despite the prolific nature of Author Mezrich’s book
writing, it reads as if he had just been to some creative writing course
which entails that every noun gets an adjective e.g. “fake-wood bureau”,
“vomit colored carpet”, “bright red plastic cups”, and so on. Perhaps this
was Thad’s description of his life, environment and background, but it
certainly made reading more tedious than it should.
At B. 630, it is at the upper bracket of paperbacks, but
it is still an engrossing book, without being riveting.
