One astronaut’s messy, exhilarating story, with no edges sanded off.
A pilot afflicted with arrested development grows up fast when he becomes a space-shuttle astronaut.
Navy pilots have Top Gun; investigative journalists have All the President’s Men; and astronauts will always see and be seen through the prism of The Right Stuff. West Point grad and hotshot Air Force pilot Mullane acknowledges as much in his memoir’s opening scene, which finds him and 19 others going through a rigorous set of tests in hopes of being selected as astronauts for the space-shuttle program (extended contact with an enema is involved). Mullane is eventually chosen to join the 1978 class of astronauts, who referred to themselves as TFNGs (Thirty-Five New Guys, a play on the military acronym for Fucking New Guy) and were about as mature and PC as drunk players on a high-school football team. Mullane longwindedly recalls the training process and tells stories of his childhood and married and military life. Along the way, we gain an appreciation for his love of bathroom humor, danger, rockets and other big machines that go really fast. (We also learn of the practical jokes he and his pilot buddies played on civilians.) Occasionally fun, these sections grow monotonous fast, but the books gains substantial traction once Mullane finally makes it into space onboard Discovery in 1984. It’s worth wading through his adolescent hijinks to get to these descriptions of the nerve-jangling launches, the rapturous beauty of space and the unbelievably foul living conditions aboard the ship (the mechanics of a zero-gravity toilet are worth hearing about). Mullane’s explanations of how he became disenchanted with NASA bureaucracy and his achingly tragic recollections of crewmates who perished in the Columbia tragedy raise this book above the ranks of the standard-issue boys-in-space memoir.
One astronaut’s messy, exhilarating story, with no edges sanded off.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7682-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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