An admirable account of an icon of the golden age of space flight.
The troubled but ultimately redeemed life of the second man to walk on the Moon.
Beginning with the 1969 launch of Apollo 11, Aldrin (co-author: Look to the Stars, 2009, etc.) and co-author Abraham deliver a blow-by-blow account of the journey, landing and return. Readers will be amazed at the feat—achieved with archaic technology—but also recall wistfully that this was the last time that a mighty America flexed its muscles before the world and received unanimous cheers. For Aldrin, the historic mission proved to be an extremely tough act to follow. With no shortage of astronauts, he was not able to return to the Moon; he yearned to command the Air Force Academy, but superiors chose someone else. Like all driven, ambitious men, Aldrin was brutally self-critical. He had achieved his greatest ambition at the age of 39, at which point life seemed to lose its purpose. He began to suffer from depression. Emotional illness was the kiss of death to a military career in the 1970s, so he had to retire. Over the next decade depression and alcoholism overwhelmed him, destroying his marriage and limiting his efforts to forge a new career. His unsentimental account of recovery does not conceal repeated failures or the debilitating depression that still occasionally haunts him. Today Aldrin, nearing 80, remains an active public figure working to reenergize America’s faltering space program. As is the case with many memoirs by famous people without a writing background, the author describes events better than people or feelings. He clearly loves his new wife, admires the many rich and powerful people he works with and overflows with ideas for promoting space travel.
An admirable account of an icon of the golden age of space flight.Pub Date: June 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-46345-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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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