Astronaut Scott Kelly, a four-time veteran of off-planet missions, retells his year aboard the International Space Station and offers a personal view of astronautics.
His memoir, Endurance: A Year In Space, A Lifetime of Discovery, is a small classic of exploration literature as well as space literature ...brings life in space alive — the wonder and awe of it, and also the jagged edges, the rough parts of living in confined quarters in an alien element, far from everything familiar and beloved ...with its honest, gritty descriptions of an unimaginable life, a year off Earth, is as close as most readers will come to making that voyage themselves.
If Scott Kelly has any say on the matter, we shall go to Mars and beyond, with the discipline and determination that fill the pages of his memoir chronicling the extraordinary life he’s lived on Earth and in space ...narrative is split between Kelly’s year in space — a zero-gravity journey of 'unprecedented' duration — and his personal development from a child reading The Right Stuff into a decorated naval test pilot ...in Endurance, Kelly’s humor and self-awareness when relating his experiences at home make them just as absorbing as those aboard the station ...sharp self-observation and narrative poignancy make for a fascinating tale of a life lived on Earth, too...brilliant insight into the human aspect of space travel by paying equal attention to the origin story as to its climax among the stars ...lessons and truths within the pages of Endurance as the blueprints for their own trips into the unknown.
...Endurance, astronaut Scott Kelly’s memoir (written with Margaret Lazarus Dean) of his record-setting year on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015, offers Earthlings an informative and gripping look at both the adventures and day-by-day experiences of living in a metal container that is orbiting Earth at 17,500 mph ... brings our dreams crashing down to Earth, vividly reminding us of the many challenges — some mundane, others quite scary — of that cosmic frontier ...filled with minutiae on the ISS’s modules and equipment, which space aficionados will probably lap up, yet it remains a fascinating read ...language is earnest and straightforward, just the style one expects from an astronaut.
