For spacious skies : the uncommon journey of a Mercury astronaut /

This autobiography of Scott Carpenter (written with daughter Kristen Stoever), the second American to orbit the Earth, begins with a history of Carpenter ancestors, from the Plymouth Colony up through his childhood in Boulder, Colorado. Carpenter joined the Navy in 1943 and was in flight training when the war ended. After graduating from the University of Colorado, he joined the Navy again in 1949, and in 1959 he became one of the original seven Mercury astronauts. His flight in Aurora 7 is described in great detail. After resigning from NASA in 1967, he continued to work on the Navy's Sealab underwater habitat program as an aquanaut. Carpenter's adventures as an astronaut were profiled by Tom Wolfe in his book The Right Stuff (CH, Mar'80). For Spacious Skies is a good addition to the history of space exploration and the experiences of an astronaut's family during the early days of manned space flight. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers; lower-division undergraduates through faculty. A. M. Strauss Vanderbilt University

Apparently written largely by Carpenter's daughter, this account of the famed Mercury astronaut's life is comprehensive but dwells unduly on quotidian aspects of its subject's family life. Anyone interested in Carpenter is interested in him, after all, because of his three-orbit flight in 1962, especially because its less-than-perfect performance has engendered debate among the cognoscenti about whether the machine or the man was at fault. Flight director Chris Kraft (Flight, 2001) blamed Carpenter and claimed to have blackballed him (Carpenter never did rocket to space again), but Stoever creditably defends her father, quoting a NASA engineer who wrote that Carpenter saved the mission and his life. Prior to this central event, Stoever recounts in detail the fractured family Carpenter grew up in, and the large one he and his first wife formed, stressing the strains of peripatetic living as the navy ordered aviator Carpenter hither and yon. The story picks up momentum with Carpenter's selection as a Mercury astronaut. Just the ticket for space buffs. --Gilbert Taylor

Amid a flurry of recent accounts of the early days of the U.S. space program, astronaut Carpenter and Stoever, his daughter, weigh in with a biography (most of it written jarringly in the third person) of the fourth American in space. While a good deal of factual information about Carpenter's life is presented, there is very little probing beneath the surface. Perhaps the most controversial material is Carpenter's discussion of the specifics of his three-orbit flight on May 24, 1962, which ended with the American public not knowing for hours whether Carpenter and his Mercury capsule Aurora 7 had survived re-entry. His take is very different from that offered last year by Chris Kraft (Flight: My Life in Mission Control). While the former mission controller claims that Carpenter "malfunctioned," Carpenter argues that he fulfilled his tasks admirably despite a series of mechanical failures on board the capsule. The third person voice is lively if not compelling, and though there is not very much new information about the early days of NASA here, one can get a flavor of the times and a sense of the people responsible for bringing America into the space age. Pictures not seen by PW. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Former astronaut Carpenter joins with his daughter to tell the story of his life, focusing on the landmark Project Mercury. With a seven-city author tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Mercury astronaut turned thriller-writer Carpenter (The Steel Albatross, 1990) and his daughter put on the dampeners as they tell his life story thus far. It's not their subdued tone, though, that robs this autobiography of its potential vitality. That is accomplished by using the third person, which establishes too great a distance between the reader and Carpenter, pulling the rug out from under the immediacy the story begs for-an immediacy that it gets only for the few hours when Carpenter is in his Aurora 7 orbiting Earth: he then takes control of the story much as he did his capsule when the fuel ran out due to equipment malfunction. Carpenter spent his early years in the company of his grandparents, his mother away for long stretches of time in a sanitarium with tuberculosis, his father having deserted the family. Carpenter did keep in touch with his father through letters, which are reproduced here, allowing readers into the head of the young man. As a military test plot at Patuxent, he became a prime candidate for the Mercury Program. Description of the screening and selection process for that adventure, its endless "psychophysiological nit-picking," hews closely to Tom Wolfe's handling of it in The Right Stuff, though these authors retune the characterizations ("John Glenn was more ambitious, more talented, funnier, and more charismatic than the humorless Calvinist of The Right Stuff"). The space flight is the centerpiece, a truly dangerous and punishing mission ("I was trained to avoid any active intellectual comprehension of disaster," he notes as his spacecraft started to fail him). His work for SeaLab after the Mercury Program gets skimmed over. And why mention that he's had three divorces without then delving at least a bit into that part of the life? Still, enough of Carpenter comes off the pages to reveal the elemental audacity we've come to associate with the seven Mercury astronauts. (16 pp. b&w photos) Author tour