Review: Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery

Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I hadn’t read a book about astronauts since “The Right Stuff”, and I figured this would kind of be like that one. Way wrong, even though “The Right Stuff” makes an appearance here as the book that drove author Scott Kelly to becoming an astronaut. Instead of the 1950s test pilot personalities that populated “The Right Stuff”, Kelly’s autobiography shows that nowadays astronauting is less the man against nature story, and more about man against the complex machine. The anecdotes here are not stories of swashbucklers or lone cowboys, they are the stories of scientists forced to follow procedure or, to coin a phrase, action bureaucrats. The stories in space didn’t really grab me.

What did stand out was the story of Kelly’s schooling and of his rise through NASA. Kelly is likely one of the very few self-professed bad students to work his way through college/academy and into the astronaut program. This part of the book is greatly uplifting, showing a student who didn’t apply himself to his schooling and got bad grades could find a purpose (in that Tom Wolfe book!) that would provide the impetus to become a good student with excellent grades in order to become a Navy pilot and later, astronaut. This was very impressive. The author continues telling of his rise through the Navy and NASA, giving details into the conversations he had when getting promotions or reassignments. I found this very interesting as the story of a career.

I listened to the audio version of this book, read by the author. His voice is very even throughout, perhaps too steady and unemotional. A professional narrator would have made this sound quite differently, and possibly better.

Overall, I liked the career story of an astronaut, from difficult student-hood through academy and military training. I found the anecdotes about his time in space to be surprisingly less intense, but maybe this means that space travel is becoming less the risky world of the explorer and more like the world of the office worker, albeit with plenty of procedures.


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