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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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