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RIDING ROCKETS

THE OUTRAGEOUS TALES OF A SPACE SHUTTLE ASTRONAUT

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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