From jacket flap:
Ten years ago the moon was a remote celestial object of telescopic study. Today it is rapidly becoming more accessible than some parts of earth. Instruments have been soft-landed on its surface and measurements made, close-up photographic surveys carried out, and in July of this year the moon’s dust was disturbed by man for the first time in its existence.
Yet, despite the enormous strides forward, despite tons of scientific papers, many of the old controversies about the origin, structure and condition of the moon remain unresolved and have been added to the process of uncompleted evaluation of the vast new observational and photographic material.
Just before the first rocket hit the moon, the author wrote Strange World of the Moon, in which he reviewed without fear or favour, the totality of the then available data.
In The Old Moon and the New he now re-examines and re-assesses some previous conceptions and suggests new ones.
About the author (from Wikipedia):
Valdemar Axel Firsoff was known principally as an amateur astronomer. He was born in 1912 of Swedish descent, and died on 19 November 1981. He lived in Lochearnhead, Scotland, before moving to Somerset, England, where he settled in Glastonbury.
Many of his books also touched on extraterrestrial life and the nature of the mind. In Life, Mind and Galaxies, he speculated that “mind seems to be an entity of the same order as energy and matter”, an idea well before its time. In other aspects of his work, such as the nature of the lunar craters, which he considered to be of volcanic rather than cosmological origin, he was later proved to be well wide of the mark.
Firsoff crater, located in Meridiani Planum on the planet Mars, is named in Firsoff’s honor. Firsoff Crater is located at 2.63° North, 350.58° East.
