Review Detail

While there have been a number of other books about Glenn and his mission including We Seven: By the Astronauts Themselves by Carpenter, et al., Wolfe's The Right Stuff, Burgan's John Glenn: Young Astronaut (Childhood of Famous Americans) and the excellent National Geographic Liftoff: A Photobiography of John Glenn (Photobiographies) by Don Mitchell, this short book is a combination of many of these. Told in a Childhood of Famous Americans with many dramatized conversations, but with more details about the actual mission, the book is highly engaging and readable.

The mix of personal and public events makes this even more intriguing. While I generally like more chronologically arranged biographies, there is a good annotated timeline at the back of the book to help navigate the narrative if necessary. It was fun to see glimpses of Glenn earning money to get a bike for a paper route in order to help his family, and the experiences of his wife and children when he was involved with NASA are something I have not really seen in other biographies. It would have been nice to have more pictures accompanying the text, but there are a number at the back of the book.

Since Glenn passed away in 2016, it is good to have updated biographies of him. With the fiftieth anniversary of the moon walk in 2019, there seems to be a renewed interest in all things NASA. This re-issue is great to hand to readers who have also devoured Olson's Lost in Outer Space: The Incredible Journey of Apollo 13, Aldrin's To the Moon and Back: My Apollo 11 Adventure, Slade's Countdown: 2979 Days to the Moon, and Mark Kelly's Astrotwins fiction series.