A vivid, engrossing, and enthusiastically written memoir of aeronautic ambition.
A seasoned astronaut charts the trajectory of his love affair with space and astronomy.
Massimino’s memoir is a smooth combination of personal history and immersive storytelling. Motivated by a childhood preoccupation with space exploration and astronauts like Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and John Glenn, the author developed an obsession for the “reality of space travel” in his early years growing up on Long Island. Intensive academic studies at Columbia and MIT strengthened his resolve to pursue the space program—as did the tragedy of the 1986 Challenger explosion. Being accepted into the NASA space program (and overcoming some eyesight correction issues) made his dreams come true. Massimino writes of training for six years prior to embarking on his first interstellar mission aboard the NASA space shuttle Columbia in 2002 on a mission to rendezvous with the Hubble Space Telescope. Yet even with training on his side, the author admits that, as a rookie astronaut, “nothing you do on this planet can ever truly prepare you for what it means to leave it.” He also suspensefully re-creates his second mission into space to repair the telescope in 2008. Written in affable, conversational prose, the book delivers a sensory buffet of sights, sounds, and inspired images with an appealing urgency. Like Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars, Massimino’s memoir is stuffed with fascinating details about the unforeseen complications of weightlessness, the zero-gravity experience, and the intricate physical, psychological, and “gut-dropping, nerve-racking, panic-inducing situations” involved in the flight-readiness training program and actual spaceflight itself. Even readers with just a casual interest in space travel will find themselves glued to the page as the author braids a childhood dream and a desire to make a positive impact on the space program with the ambition and bravery required to be blasted 350 miles into low Earth orbit. Massimino makes having “the right stuff” both breathtaking and formidable.
A vivid, engrossing, and enthusiastically written memoir of aeronautic ambition.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90354-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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