Cheap Carrying the Fire (Book) (Michael Collins) Price

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Customer Reviews of Carrying the Fire

Benchmark Against Which all Others are Still Rated
The original and - after 30-plus years - still the best of the astronaut auto-biographies (and bios). Put simply, it is the benchmark against which all subsequent astro bios are measured. Only Cunningham's "All American Boys" and in the last year Mullane's "Riding Rockets" come close, but "Carrying the Fire" is still by far the best book. <
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>I have either read or hold copies of all the astro biographies, and "Carrying the Fire" is my favourite. Written in Collins' modest, self-deprecating style, the book is an excellent account of the human emotions - as well as the technical detail - of two extraordinary spaceflights. Collins was clearly a gifted person - as Walter Cunningham would later write in "The All American Boys", Collins was clearly a more capable test pilot than he gave himself credit for in his own book, but he also had a touch of poet in him. He tells the story of waiting to board Apollo 11 on the morning of 16 July 1969, and closing one eye to see only the launch tower and spacecraft and then closing the other eye to see nothing but the Atlantic Ocean and the Florida beaches - "the Florida that Ponce de Leon would have seen" centuries before. A very thoughful juxtaposition from a man no doubt nervously waiting to board a spacecraft on man's first moon landing attempt. <
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>He also writes candidly of his emotional roller coaster journey leading up to Apollo 11 - especially the disappointment and uncertainty surrounding spinal surgery in 1968 which cost him a seat on the first mission around the Moon (Apollo 8) but which resulted in a seat on the first landing mission. He wrote of the irony of his journey along the highway to the San Antonio, Texas hospital, which if followed on to California ended at the plant where "iron men" asembled the Apollo spacecraft, but which in his case stopped short, where he ended up in major surgery, possibly which his Air Force and NASA careers at an end. <
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>I have never met Collins, but through his book I am sure I would have liked him, not only as a boyhood hero of mine but also as an honest story-teller, and one who has a fabulously clear and captivating writing style. <
>I must have read this book 20 times, and every time I find something different. It is a refreshing book of one man's amazing journey and the almost accidental role he considers he played in history. <
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>This book comes recommended in a way that no other book about the US space program does. I have given it 5 stars, but it deserves 6, 7 or 8. <
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>An essential book for anyone - everyone - interested in the astronauts.