John Glenn is best known for the 218 hours he's spent in space, but his memoirs prove that the rest of his life has been equally interesting.
The son of a small-town plumber, Glenn grew up in an era when nobody locked their doors and local farmers still drove horse-drawn carriages. He came of age in the last days of rural America, and he has had a front row seat for many of the social and political changes of the century.
Glenn flew combat missions in World War II and Korea, helped launch the Space Age as an astronaut and shaped the U.S. government as a senator. An exceptionally hardworking and intelligent man, he has mastered aerodynamics, engineering and politics.
What makes John Glenn: A Memoir surprising is how normal a life this astronaut has lived. He married his childhood sweetheart, literally meeting his wife Annie in the playpen. They enjoyed happy childhoods, raised two healthy and successful children of their own, and had as quiet a home life as a military family can have.
Great moments in human history aside, he has very few wild stories to tell, but there are anecdotes to spare.
The book reveals Glenn as the type of man who will spontaneously invite a visiting Soviet cosmonaut to a family dinner -- giving the cosmonaut's handlers and the State Department fits -- and then call around to his neighbors to round up enough steaks to serve. He's a man whose wife conquers a lifelong stutter, only to tell him, "John, I've wanted to tell you this for years: Pick up your socks." In short, he's an ordinary guy.
Fortunately, Glenn has no trouble making both the ordinary and the extraordinary facets of his life entertaining. His writing style is relaxed and folksy without sacrificing clarity, and whatever work collaborator Nick Taylor did to improve the book is invisible.
How it feels to fly
Glenn depicts personalities and events with a sharp eye, both taking pride in his accomplishments and pointing out his mistakes.
However, he really shines at describing the hardware and "how to" of flying. Readers not only learn why the gull-winged F4U Corsair was designed that way, but how to aim the guns of an F4F Wildcat fighter. Far from being simply a personal memoir, John Glenn is full of talk about fighter tactics, training methods, and the physics behind test plane and rocket failures.
Technical detail like this can be trivial and boring in the wrong hands, but Glenn always focuses on the most interesting points while keeping his tale moving. More importantly, he shows rare talent for conveying how it feels to fly.
Not surprisingly, the enthusiasm and focus carry through to his adventures in space. Glenn sometimes lets years pass by in a single chapter, but the Mercury Project forms the heart of the book, and his mission aboard Friendship 7 is described in literally minute-by-minute detail. His flight aboard the space shuttle Discovery receives similar attention, providing a strong close to the story of a man's adventures in space.
Reading John Glenn: A Memoir also serves to remind us just how far space exploration has come in 40 years.
When Glenn went into orbit, nobody knew how the human body would adapt to extraplanetary conditions. Things that are common knowledge today -- that you can swallow in space, for instance, or that weightlessness does not distort eyeballs and cause vision problems -- had to be tested for the first time, and Glenn did many of those tests.
It's also hard to imagine that even when Glenn first went into space, some people worried that he was too old at the age of 40. Now, at the age of 78, Glenn seems young at heart. He's physically fit, still in love with his wife, and excited about life.
He's a lucky man, and we're lucky to get to know him in the pages of this autobiography. We can only hope that someday he'll add another chapter or two.
Chris Aylott is co-owner of the Space-Crime Continuum, a science fiction and mystery bookstore
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