more info from news article on the book
Scott Carpenter's memoirs "For Spacious Skies: The Uncommon Journey of a
Mercury Astronaut," by Scott Carpenter and Kris Stoever, Harcourt, 370
pages, $26.
By RAY LOCKER Associated Press
The disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia on Feb. 1 again showed the
world the dangers of space flight, something the seven members of the
Mercury astronaut corps understood every day. As America's fourth man in
space aboard Aurora 7, Scott Carpenter was one of those seven, an experience
he re-counts in "For Spacious Skies," a sad, affecting and sometimes odd
memoir. While undeniably brave and accomplished, today's as- tronauts bear
only superficial resemblance to the Mercury 7, those test pilots turned folk
, heroes who had the right stuff not just for their flying skill but their
ability to thrive un- der public scrutiny. Carpenter excelled on all levels.
In him, Carpenter and co-author Kris Stoever write, the space program "had
found an elite athlete, a genetic fluke, blessed with a strong heart and
cardiorespiratory capacity, ideal combinations of fast-twitch and
slow-twitch muscle fiber, plus hand-eye co-ordination, strength and speed."
But his physical gifts - masked deep undercurrents of sadness and
recklessness. The child of a broken home, Carpenter lived with his maternal
grandparents in Colorado after his mother came down with tuberculosis and
his father es- sentially abandoned them. Much of the early book in- cludes
passages from Carpenter's affection-seeking letters to his father in New
York. That longing for paternal approval, Carpenter and Stoever write, led
to Carpenter's "many renegade years," which culminated "episodically,
with
fare personal achievement and self-destruction of equal virtuosity: six cars
totaled. Four marriages. Seven children. From all of them, somehow, boy and
man always managed to walk away." Carpenter rarely walked away unscathed,
however. A memoir featuring an achievement of anyone's lifetime - a place in
the Mercury program - also includes failure and disappointment. Aurora 7 was
Carpenter's only space flight; he was the only Mercury astronaut not to go
into space after the program ended. The book trails off after Aurora 7,
devoting only a dozen or so pages to Carpenter's role in the Navy's
underwater Sealab program during the 1960s. After that, there's little,
except for a brief passage about how a series of in- juries kept him from
diving and flying high-performance jets. It leaves the reader won- dering
what else happened to him. "For Spacious Skies" is a rare memoir because it
reads more like a standard biogra- phy, right down to its use of
third-person narration. Also, Stoever is Carpenter's daughter, but that
connection becomes apparent only near the end of the book.
John Carpenter
Walpole,NH
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