Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History by Ben Mezrich

(Doubleday, $27)

There are two versions of the Thad Roberts tale, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. The “no-frills version” goes like this: Roberts was a highly intelligent young man who wanted to be an astronaut. In 2002, while interning for NASA, he stole a safe containing the moon rocks collected during all the Apollo missions. Roberts was later caught bungling an attempt to sell the priceless rocks and went to prison for eight years. When told by Ben Mezrich, Roberts’s story “gets much frillier.” Beginning with its ginned-up title, the book spins from the facts a Hollywood-ready tale that casts Roberts and his closest accomplice as lovable rogues. Unfortunately, Mezrich “fakes and pads so excitably that his own tricks are better than those of his characters.”

True, Mezrich’s creative approach to nonfiction “can be slightly off-putting,” said Rowan Kaiser in the A.V. Club. You sometimes wonder whether the author could even tell a story without inventing dialogue or festooning minor incidents with overblown prose. Yet this book’s “advantages far outweigh the quibbles.” Fans of Mezrich’s previous work will recognize in his Roberts a “mirror image” of the Mark Zuckerberg we met in The Accidental Billionaires, Mezrich’s best-selling account of the founding of Facebook. Both are smart, ambitious young men with self-esteem issues and stunted senses of morality. But those qualities propel Zuckerberg to achieve, while Roberts takes the criminal route.

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Puzzling out what makes the character tick is the book’s main hook, said Larry Lebowitz in The Miami Herald. Roberts suggests that he stole the rocks to prove his love for another NASA intern—“literally giving her the moon.” (The couple have sex in a hotel with the moon rocks stashed under the mattress, thus inspiring the book’s title.) But whatever Roberts’s true motivations, Mezrich’s own are clear: Just as Billionaires inspired The Social Network, Sex on the Moon is designed to be a movie treatment in hardcover. If you “want to enjoy a rollicking summertime page-turner,” this is the book to buy.