Sex on the Moon

Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History, by Ben Mezrich, read by Casey Affleck, 308 pages, 8 hours 33 minutes on downloadable audio

Just about every guy promises to give his girlfriend the moon, but Thad Roberts was the first guy in history to make good on that promise. Thad was an intern at NASA when he hatched the mind-bendingly insane plan to steal moon rocks (actual lunar samples gathered by astronauts on the Apollo missions) from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Sex on the Moon is a true-crime heist story, though there are certainly some minor fabrications that make this read much more like a novel. Mezrich does a great job weaving together the story of former shy Mormon kid Thad as he reinvents himself into a social and intellectual leader at NASA. Mezrich also mixes in regular updates about Axel Emmerman, the Belgian rock collector to whom Thad hopes to sell his ill-gotten moon rocks and who is the true hero that helps the FBI nab Thad in his prank gone way too far. Based on interviews, transcripts, and letters Thad wrote from prison, this is a great story, that makes the reader (or in my case, the listener) wonder just how a guy with so promising a future (he was on his way to being a bona fide astronaut!!!) do such a dumb thing. Casey Affleck's laid-back reading style was perfectly suited to this book, and I'd recommend checking it out, though I will admit that I had to speed up the playback a little since he got, at times, a little too laid back. Great for fans of heists, space, and science.