Patrick Moore
Description
Sir Patrick Alfred Caldwell-Moore was born in Pinner in Middlesex, the child of a Captain and his wife. He was raised in East Grinstead and educated at home due to chronic health problems. He joined the British Astronomical Association at eleven years of age. When he was 14, his mentor at the observatory in East Grinstead was killed, and Moore was asked to run the observatory. In 1941, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. In 1943, while Moore was training abroad, his fiancée was killed by a bomb in London. In 1944, he returned to England, and was posted as the navigator of a Vickers Wellington bomber in Cumbria. After the war, he taught school from 1945-1953. His first book, Guide to the Moon (later retitled Patrick Moore on the Moon), was published in 1953. He wrote and translated several books of astronomy and fiction, including the late 1970s series the Scott Saunders Space Adventure. In the 1957, he began a television show on the BBC network about astronomy, The Sky at Night, which aired monthly until his death in 2012 and made him the longest-serving TV presenter. Moore was president of the British Astronomical Association, co-founder and president of the Society for Popular Astronomy (SPA), author of over 70 books on astronomy. His specialty was Moon observation.
Books
This every night
In New York City, devastated by AIDS, poverty and violence, a young struggles to discover what life is all about. During nightly forays, searching for anonymous sex, he visits the piers, the bars, the sex clubs. Then, one night, he discovers something he never knew existed, something that reveals the secret of himself, the nature of his community.
Beyond Shame
The radical sexuality of gay American men in the 1970s is often seen as a shameful period of excess that led to the AIDS crisis. Beyond Shame claims that when the gay community divorced itself from this allegedly tainted legacy, the tragic result was an intergenerational disconnect because the original participants were unable to pass on a sense of pride and identity to younger generations. Indeed, one reason for the current rise in HIV, Moore argues, is precisely due to this destructive occurrence, which increased the willingness of younger gay men to engage in unsafe sex. Lifting the'veil of AIDS,' Moore recasts the gay male sexual culture of the 1970s as both groundbreaking and creative-provocatively comparing extreme sex to art. He presents a powerful yet nuanced snapshot of a maligned, forgotten era. Moore rescues gay America's past, present, and future from a disturbing spiral of destruction and AIDS-related shame, illustrating why it's critical for the gay community to reclaim the decade.