A spaceman delivers an overlong chronicle of his adventures that may prove engaging to ardent space fans.
An astronaut’s memoir from “a small-town boy from Nebraska—nothing special, just an ordinary American.”
Retired astronaut Anderson spent more than 38 hours spacewalking and five months on the International Space Station (“ISS”—acronyms proliferate at NASA and in his book). The athletic former Boy Scout from Nebraska, previously employed as an engineer at the Johnson Space Center, finally landed the coveted job as astronaut after 15 years of annual applications. After his acceptance, Anderson underwent rigorous preparation in jets, on mountainside treks, and in prolonged periods underwater. He learned Russian and trained in Star City, located outside Moscow, in order to work on the ISS. The stressful, rigid toil paid off, and the author delivers graphic descriptions of the sensations experienced during liftoff into space and life in orbit, including annoyances that were expressed perhaps a bit too freely to colleagues on Earth. He was not listed for future long-duration flights. Better were conversations in space with his wife and children who, throughout the book, receive heartfelt expressions of his enduring love. The author also frequently registers his Christian faith. Some NASA arcana, like mission commemorative patches, will interest true space buffs, and Anderson seems eager to answer predictable questions regarding bodily functions in space. He announces, more than once, his pride in the “incredible opportunities” to “poop in four different spacecraft!” He goes into considerable detail about that opportunity and natural human bowel movements in general. Indeed, the author is prideful in several areas, including his modesty and humanity in the face of stresses and dangers. Throughout, Anderson seeks to maintain an upbeat tone. However, underneath the brave bonhomie, there is occasional snarky, artificial gravitas, and the geniality sours just a bit.
A spaceman delivers an overlong chronicle of his adventures that may prove engaging to ardent space fans.Pub Date: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8032-6282-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
