A genial, readable account of mountain climbing, spaceship travel, and other adventures.
A memoir from an astronaut whom Homer Hickam calls “a wonder, a fellow who has packed in more exploits in his lifetime than most of us can imagine.”
The son of a peripatetic salesman for Boeing, Parazynski is a cosmopolitan space traveler who spent his formative years in far-flung global locales like Athens, Dakar, Beirut, and Tehran. He is a tall, good-looking physician at ease with several languages, and he is also an experienced luge competitor, avid trekker and scuba diver, inventor, and a member of the Explorers Club. While in medical school, he decided he wanted to become an astronaut, enduring the rigorous preparation described by fellow space jocks in similar autobiographies. Parazynski reports on flight training, hours spent underwater in NASA’s space simulator, a stay in Star City, Russia, and—a topic popular in space travelers’ reports—weightless toilet experiences. During his career, the author flew five space shuttle missions and took seven spacewalks. In space, he installed a robotic arm and repaired the International Space Station’s solar array. Aloft, he served as John Glenn’s personal physician. Still up for adventure after retirement, Parazynski climbed Mount Everest, a feat yet unmatched by any other astronaut. Along with some mountaineering jargon (“the terrain is quite technical, with upwards traverses on featureless, snow-dusted slabby rock while under tension from my ascender”), the author offers some NASA nomenclature—e.g., EVAs (extravehicular activity), MAGs (maximum absorbency garments—i.e., diapers), the ISS (International Space Station), and PGT (pistol grip tool). Plenty of former astronauts have written about their careers in books that tend to sound alike with references to family values in the face of profound risk, a hint of philosophy, boisterous camaraderie, natural bravado, true pride, and true or false humility. Among the proliferation of these, Parazynski’s is presented with a bit more panache.
A genial, readable account of mountain climbing, spaceship travel, and other adventures.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5039-3670-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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