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
Graceful and deeply felt.
A collection of personal pieces, combined into an affecting memoir by longtime New Yorker editor Angell.
The author, a noted baseball writer (A Pitcher’s Story, 2001, etc.), has many intimate connections to the magazine Gardner Botsford once dubbed “The Comic Weekly,” in which most of these reminiscences originally appeared. His mother, Katherine, was the New Yorker’s fiction editor; years later, Angell held her former job—and occupied her office. His stepfather, E.B. White, was the magazine’s most important contributor during its most influential years. The memoir mostly concerns New Yorker colleagues and other remarkable people who have been a part of the author’s life. His father, lawyer Ernest Angell, lost Katherine to the younger White but over the years became a figure of immense importance to Roger. Angell loved his mother, loved White, loved his first wife (not much here about the cause of their 1960s divorce), loved his coworkers, loved his job. His portraits are really tributes, whether of the well-known William Maxwell, V.S. Pritchett, Harold Ross or William Shawn, or the lesser-known Botsford and Emily Hahn. Angell offers some New Yorker–insider tidbits (Ian Frazier mimicked Shawn’s voice so well that he could fool colleagues over the phone) and a bit more than you want to know about some of his aunts, one of whom wrote a book about Willa Cather. A dazzling story-within-a-story describes a 1940 round of golf with a mysterious woman who lost a valuable ring. The author seems uncertain how an iPod works but reveals an expertise with machine guns. His fickle memory frustrates and bemuses him. Sometimes he can recall only sensory images; sometimes the story unreeling in his mind skips, stops, fades, dissolves into something else. In several of his most appealing passages, he writes about the fictions that memory fashions.
Graceful and deeply felt.Pub Date: May 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101350-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
IN THE NEWS
A slim volume packed with nourishing nuggets of wisdom.
Life lessons from the celebrated poet.
Angelou (A Song Flung Up to Heaven, 2002, etc.) doesn’t have a daughter, per se, but “thousands of daughters,” multitudes that she gathers here in a Whitmanesque embrace to deliver her experiences. They come in the shape of memories and poems, tools that readers can fashion to their needs. “Believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things,” she writes, proceeding to recount pungent moments, stories in which her behavior sometimes backfired, and sometimes surprised even herself. Much of it is framed by the “struggle against a condition of surrender” or submission. She refuses to preach or consider her personal insights as generalized edicts. She is reminded of the charity that words and gestures bring and the liberation that comes with honesty. Lies, she notes, often spring out of fear. She cheated madness by counting her blessings. She is enlivened by those in love. She understands the uses and abuses of violence. Occasionally a bit of old-fashioned advice filters in, as during a commencement address/poem in which she urges the graduates to make a difference, to be present and accountable. The topics are mostly big, raw and exposed. Where is death’s sting? “It is here in my heart.” Overarching each brief chapter is the vital energy of a woman taking life’s measure with every step.
A slim volume packed with nourishing nuggets of wisdom.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6612-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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