A wholly admiring assessment of Armstrong the aviator and Armstrong the man.
A longtime NBC News space correspondent looks back on the aviation career of the first man to set foot on the moon.
Given his starring role in one of history’s most magnificent achievements, shouldn’t Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) be a bigger deal? Following Apollo 11’s trailblazing 1969 flight, Armstrong worked a couple of years for NASA, then taught for a few more at the University of Cincinnati. Except for a brief, high-profile role investigating the causes of the Challenger disaster and an occasional speaking engagement, he assiduously avoided the spotlight, never cashing in on his fame. By the time of his death, he easily passed unrecognized in public. Barbree (“Live From Cape Canaveral”: Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today, 2007, etc.), who covered every American manned space flight and became especially friendly with Armstrong, nevertheless barely pierces the habitual Armstrong reserve. Except for occasional tidbits of personal information—the astronaut’s friendship with John Glenn, the premature death of his daughter, the fire that razed his home—this account focuses primarily on Armstrong the pilot, particularly his coolness in tight spots: ejecting from a shot-up fighter plane in Korea, recovering from a “stuck thruster” in orbit aboard Gemini 8, ejecting from the lunar lander training module just before it crashed, and famously guiding the Eagle to touchdown in the Sea of Tranquility with fuel running dangerously low. These moments take up the bulk of Barbree’s amiable account. He supplies useful context by examining the origins and development of NASA’s manned flight program, including a good deal of information about astronaut training. The author insists that Armstrong never regarded himself as special and never lobbied to be first on the moon; he saw himself merely as next in line to take what turned out to be “a ‘Lindbergh’ step in flight.”
A wholly admiring assessment of Armstrong the aviator and Armstrong the man.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04071-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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