astronaut wives club book review

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By Eric Benson

• July 19, 2013

The most iconic telling of our great national myth of space conquest, Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff,” opens with a scene of a wife frantically imagining that her husband has died. The woman, Jane Conrad, has been informed by a growing chorus of fellow officer wives that something has happened at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station, where her husband, Pete, is a test pilot. Jane knows what something means. She can all but see Pete’s mangled, charred remains lying amid the palmetto grass, the smoking wreckage of his aircraft strewn about. As the minutes tick by, she grows increasingly panicked and calls the office of Pete’s squadron. They refuse to answer her questions. She hangs up and waits for her doorbell to ring, now certain of her fate. Her husband is dead. (We learn on the next page that he is, in fact, alive. A decade and a half later, Pete Conrad walks on the moon.)

Imagine a book-length exploration of Jane Conrad’s feelings of anxiety and helplessness, devotion and dread, and you’ll get a sense of Lily Koppel’s latest work of nonfiction, “The Astronaut Wives Club,” essentially a retelling of “The Right Stuff” and Norman Mailer’s “Of a Fire on the Moon” from the perspective of the women behind the spacemen. The story of NASA’s early years typically follows an arc from fear to triumph. In October 1957, Americans stare up at the dark specter of Sputnik 1 and dream of Soviet missiles raining down from orbit. Less than 12 years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon, the bear vanquished. Koppel tracks this same history, but in her version the trajectory is reversed. The women begin their journey as enthusiastic, patriotic housewives. They end it disillusioned, angry and wise.

The first half of this book is little more than historical fluff. Writing in a one-of-the-gals third person, Koppel — a former reporter for The New York Times and the author of “The Red Leather Diary” — tells us that her subjects are “very different, complicated women,” but portrays them as indistinguishable domestic goddesses. The wives face down the frenzied press with “slightly knitted eyebrows, perfectly applied lipstick and well-­practiced aplomb.” Shopping and socializing seem to be their primary vocations, and Koppel lavishes great detail on the wives’ sartorial choices. (Betty Grissom selected both “a marigold scoop neck” dress for a group photo on the cover of Life magazine and “a sunny yellow shirtwaist dress, cinched at her slim waist with a belt,” for an inside shot.) Lest we get the mistaken idea that these women lived for clothes, Koppel emphasizes how they slavishly adored their hunky hubbies. After one of them receives an unwanted lesbian advance in Mexico City, she and two other wives retreat to their hotel, where they “woke up to find their guys strutting into the room, reeking of maleness. That was more like it,” Koppel adds.

But tragedy comes to Togethersville, as the Houston astronaut suburbs were called, and with it both Koppel’s narrative and her subjects grow sharper and deeper. As their husbands die in training-jet crashes and the Apollo 1 fire, the wives begin to examine their lives. They wonder why they need to put up with philandering, and they question whether their domestic sacrifices are worth it. After Ed White dies in the capsule blaze, his wife, Pat, falls into an unshakable depression. “She just worked at being Ed’s wife,” another astronaut wife tells Koppel, “and she was wonderful at it, and that was all.”

By the time the Apollo 17 capsule splashes down in December 1972, the astronaut wives are a transformed brood. Some have embarked on their own careers and divorced their hero-husbands. Others have failed to move on.

In the heartbreaking epilogue, Koppel tells us that the original astronaut wives tried to meet again in the mid-1980s. The weekend before their reunion, Pat White committed suicide. Even Marge Slayton, the chief organizer of the wives, eventually had enough. Shortly after her husband, Deke, finally got his trip to space in 1975, she divorced him. “Like many of the wives,” Koppel writes, “Marge just couldn’t take it anymore — the lying, the cheating and the feeling that her husband had abandoned their home for that ‘harlot of a town,’ the Cape.” Seven of the first 30 astronaut wives lost their husbands during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo years. This sad, poignant book makes it clear that those women weren’t the only widows.

THE ASTRONAUT WIVES CLUB

A true story.

By Lily Koppel

Illustrated. 272 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $28.

Eric Benson, a former editor at New York magazine, has written about the American space program for Men’s Journal and the online magazine Guernica.

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Opinion Book review: ‘The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story’ by Lily Koppel

Curtis Sittenfeld's fourth novel, "Sisterland," will be published this month.

In 1959, the wives of the seven original American astronauts posed for the cover of Life magazine. The space program was in its infancy, with the astronauts’ names having been announced only a few months before and two years to go before the initial flight. The Life article was to serve as the country’s official, in-depth introduction to the wives — the “astrofamilies” had all signed lucrative, multi-year, exclusive contracts with the magazine — and the seven women participated in a cover shoot in which they posed at Langley Air Force Base gathered around a model of the Mercury space capsule.

As instructed by NASA and Life, all the women wore pale shirtwaist dresses, with the exception of saucy Rene Carpenter, who defied orders with a flowered scoop-neck sundress. But even she was toeing the line when it came to the pink lipstick the women had agreed upon in advance.

Yet when the magazine was published, the women's lipstick had been altered to look red. As Lily Koppel writes in "The Astronaut Wives Club," a book whose cover image is the Life photo in question: "The wives were completely shocked, worrying about how America would judge them. They would never wear such a bold colored lipstick. They were mothers, not vixens."

Such anecdotes fill this breezy and entertaining book, which — like the women themselves — takes pleasure in both playing up and defying the stereotypes of the time. Koppel notes that the wives’ stories, or at least the unvarnished versions afforded by hindsight, have never been told, and she deserves credit for recognizing the richness of the subject matter. More than 50 years after its inception, many of us now take the space program for granted, but Koppel reminds readers just how bold and innovative it felt in the Sputnik era, and how mysterious the wilderness of space remains.

As their husbands changed overnight from anonymous military pilots to international heroes, the astrowives were pulled along, in some cases willingly and in others with reluctance. Each woman’s life was defined by an essential contradiction: To increase the chances of her husband being picked for a coveted mission position, she needed to make their marriage as stable as possible, or at least she needed to make it appear stable. If her husband then was picked, she had to endure the hellish stress of watching and waiting while, in view of the entire country and much of the world, he put himself in extreme danger.

The wives referred to the launches as death watches,and their fears weren’t misplaced. A NASA insider told Susan Borman before the 1968 Apollo 8 mission — in which Susan’s husband, Frank, and two others would orbit the moon 10 times — that the men had a “50-50” chance of survival. During the mission, in the presence of her 15-year-old son, Susan began composing her husband’s eulogy. Though those men returned safely, eight astronauts died in the program’s first 12 years.

Even if a marriage was on steady ground to start with, it turned out that having your husband launched into space was the perfect recipe for its undoing. With the men in Florida most weekdays for training, the wives were often raising young children almost as single parents. “When you come back next time,” one astrowife sarcastically told her unhelpful husband, “why don’t you take a room at the Kings Inn, so I won’t be tempted to bother you?” Extramarital female attention to the astronauts was so abundant that the wives had multiple nicknames for potential temptresses: a Suzy or, if the other woman sought out the men near Cape Canaveral, a Cape Cookie.

Though journalists turned a blind eye to infidelity, they were otherwise unrelenting: peeking in windows, accosting wives at the beauty parlor and even moving into their neighborhoods.

With their husbands away and preoccupied, the wives looked to one another for support. Particularly after the families settled in 1964 in the astronaut suburb nicknamed Togethersville, near Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center, the women could dash in and out of one another’s back yards, push strollers together on walks and, during missions, hold sleepovers. At first informal, the support network eventually became official in the form of monthly meetings of the titular Astronaut Wives Club.

In one of the more poignant passages about the wives’ friendships, one of Harriet and Donn Eisele’s four children, 4-year-old Matt, develops fatal leukemia. Donn stays overnight in the hospital with him just once, finding Matt’s pain too upsetting. During this time, Koppel writes, the astrowives kept Harriet’s “freezer full of Tupperware dishes, with no names so she wouldn’t have to write thank-you cards. One wife came over and mowed the lawn without saying a word.”

Koppel clearly admires her subjects, which makes it a shame that they are increasingly difficult to keep straight. Additionally, without citations, the sources of Koppel’s facts and quotations — be they firsthand interviews or articles from the ’60s — are not apparent. The initial seven Mercury wives receive the most attention and emerge with semi-distinct identities, but by 1963, with several “generations” of astrofamilies populating Togethersville, I had given up on trying to remember who was who.

To be fair, Koppel is chronicling a cultural moment more than any particular person, and in this she excels. The details are superb, from the ham loaves the women cooked to the Virginia Slims they chain-smoked, the fur hot pants and Pucci dresses they wore, the luaus and shrimp-boil parties they threw, and the Mercury-capsule-shaped community swimming pool they shared. In a moment that perfectly summarizes time and place, Koppel describes Sue Bean and her friends lining up before a party so that Sue’s astronaut husband, Alan, a perfectionist engineer, could “put on their fake eyelashes for them. He could align and glue the black wisps ever so precisely.”

If the astronauts’ salaries were relatively modest, the perks for the families were practically unlimited: Corvettes rented for a dollar a year, hotel rooms rented for a dollar a night, tickets to Broadway plays, gift certificates to Neiman Marcus and visits to the White House, where two astrowives borrowed evening dresses from Lady Bird Johnson and the first daughters babysat their children.

In spite or perhaps because of such adventures, most astromarriages didn’t last. “It had been a patriotic duty to keep one’s marriage together in Togethersville,” Koppel explains, but the first divorce in the late ’60s “opened the floodgates.” Ultimately, of the original 30 space couples, only seven stayed together.

At the book’s conclusion, Koppel catches up with several astrowives who remember their time in Togethersville as “golden years.” Perhaps. But a particularly convincing statement comes from astrowife Barbara Cernan, who remarked, “If you think going to the Moon is hard, try staying at home.”

Curtis Sittenfeld 's fourth novel, "Sisterland," will be published this month.

THE ASTRONAUT WIVES CLUB

A True Story

By Lily Koppel

Grand Central. 271 pp. $28

“Astronaut Wives Club” book review: This…

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“astronaut wives club” book review: this ‘astrofamily” story by lily koppel defies sterotypes.

The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel

Six wives of the seven Mercury astronauts attend a 1962 luncheon in their honor in Washington, D.C. From left: Annie Glenn, Rene Carpenter, Louise Shepard, Betty Grissom, Trudy Cooper and Marjorie Slayton. Josephine Shirra, wife of astronaut Walter Shirra, was not in attendance.

NONFICTION: RELATIONSHIPS

The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story

by Lily Koppel (Grand Central)

In 1959, the wives of the seven original American astronauts posed for the cover of Life magazine. The space program was in its infancy, with the astronauts’ names having been announced only a few months before and two years to go before the initial flight. The Life article was to serve as the country’s official, in-depth introduction to the wives — the “astrofamilies” had all signed lucrative, multiyear, exclusive contracts with the magazine — and the seven women participated in a cover shoot in which they posed at Langley Air Force Base gathered around a model of the Mercury space capsule.

As instructed by NASA and Life, all the women wore pale shirtwaist dresses, with the exception of saucy Rene Carpenter, who defied orders with a flowered scoop-neck sundress. But even she was toeing the line when it came to the pink lipstick the women had agreed upon in advance.

Yet when the magazine was published, the women’s lipstick had been altered to look red. As Lily Koppel writes in “The Astronaut Wives Club,” a book whose cover image is the Life photo in question : “The wives were completely shocked, worrying about how America would judge them. They would never wear such a bold colored lipstick. They were mothers, not vixens.”

Such anecdotes fill this breezy and entertaining book, which — like the women themselves — takes pleasure in both playing up and defying the stereotypes of the time. Koppel notes that the wives’ stories, or at least the unvarnished versions afforded by hindsight, have never been told, and she deserves credit for recognizing the richness of the subject matter. More than 50 years after its inception, many of us now take the space program for granted, but Koppel reminds readers just how bold and innovative it felt in the Sputnik era, and how mysterious the wilderness of space remains.

As their husbands changed overnight from anonymous military pilots to international heroes, the astrowives were pulled along, in some cases willingly and in others with reluctance. Each woman’s life was defined by an essential contradiction: To increase the chances of her husband being picked for a coveted mission position, she needed to make their marriage as stable as possible, or at least she needed to make it appear stable. If her husband then was picked, she had to endure the hellish stress of watching and waiting while, in view of the entire country and much of the world, he put himself in extreme danger.

The wives referred to the launches as death watches, and their fears weren’t misplaced. A NASA insider told Susan Borman before the 1968 Apollo 8 mission — in which Susan’s husband, Frank, and two others would orbit the moon 10 times — that the men had a “50-50” chance of survival. During the mission, in the presence of her 15-year-old son, Susan began composing her husband’s eulogy. Although those men returned safely, eight astronauts died in the program’s first 12 years.

Even if a marriage was on steady ground to start with, it turned out that having your husband launched into space was the perfect recipe for its undoing. With the men in Florida most weekdays for training, the wives were often raising young children almost as single parents. “When you come back next time,” one astrowife sarcastically told her unhelpful husband, “why don’t you take a room at the Kings Inn, so I won’t be tempted to bother you?” Extramarital female attention to the astronauts was so abundant that the wives had multiple nicknames for potential temptresses: a Suzy or, if the other woman sought out the men near Cape Canaveral, a Cape Cookie.

Although journalists turned a blind eye to infidelity, they were otherwise unrelenting: peeking in windows, accosting wives at the beauty parlor and even moving into their neighborhoods.

With their husbands away and preoccupied, the wives looked to one another for support. Particularly after the families settled in 1964 in the astronaut suburb nicknamed Togethersville, near Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center, the women could dash in and out of one another’s backyards, push strollers together on walks and, during missions, hold sleepovers. At first informal, the support network eventually became official in the form of monthly meetings of the titular Astronaut Wives Club.

Koppel clearly admires her subjects, which makes it a shame that they are increasingly difficult to keep straight. Additionally, without citations, the sources of Koppel’s facts and quotations — be they firsthand interviews or articles from the ’60s — are not apparent. The initial seven Mercury wives receive the most attention and emerge with semi-distinct identities, but by 1963, with several “generations” of astrofamilies populating Togethersville, I had given up on trying to remember who was who.

To be fair, Koppel is chronicling a cultural moment more than any particular person, and in this she excels. The details are superb, from the ham loaves the women cooked to the Virginia Slims they chain-smoked, the fur hot pants and Pucci dresses they wore, the luaus and shrimp-boil parties they threw, and the Mercury-capsule-shaped community swimming pool they shared. In a moment that perfectly summarizes time and place, Koppel describes Sue Bean and her friends lining up before a party so that Sue’s astronaut husband, Alan, a perfectionist engineer, could “put on their fake eyelashes for them. He could align and glue the black wisps ever so precisely.”

If the astronauts’ salaries were relatively modest, the perks for the families were practically unlimited: Corvettes rented for a dollar a year, hotel rooms rented for a dollar a night, tickets to Broadway plays, gift certificates to Neiman Marcus and visits to the White House, where two astrowives borrowed evening dresses from Lady Bird Johnson and the first daughters babysat their children.

At the book’s conclusion, Koppel catches up with several astrowives who remember their time in Togethersville as “golden years.” Perhaps. But a particularly convincing statement comes from astrowife Barbara Cernan, who remarked, “If you think going to the moon is hard, try staying at home.”

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Book Review: ‘The Astronaut Wives Club,’ by Lily Koppel

By dallasnews Administrator

3:06 PM on Jun 15, 2013 CDT

Editor's note -- This review has been edited to reflect the following corrections/clarifications: The original review said that Pat White, widow of astronaut Ed White, died in 1991; she died in 1983. The review also repeated the book's description of the man she remarried as an oil tycoon; he was in the electrical business. The review also said that the Apollo 1 astronauts had been burned alive during a prelaunch test; NASA says that their deaths were from asphyxia due to inhalation of toxic gases due to fire and that a contributing cause of death was thermal burns.

On Jan. 27, 1967, Betty Grissom, Pat White and Martha Chaffee got the horrific news: Their astronaut husbands had been killed during a prelaunch test of their Apollo 1 mission.

The tragedy haunted the widows, and for one, the pain would never go away. Pat White remarried a Houston businessman, but she continued to be depressed and attempted to kill herself more than once. Finally, in 1983, the weekend before a reunion of astronaut wives, her suicide attempt was successful.

"They all believed her to be the final victim of the Apollo 1 fire," writes journalist Lily Koppel in The Astronaut Wives Club .

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How the three wives handled that tragedy is part of the story Koppel tells in this fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the lives of the women married to astronauts. But living with the fear of what might happen to their husbands on the job was only one of the problems wives faced. They formed their own support group, the Astronaut Wives Club, to deal with their fears and the challenges of marriage to America’s space heroes.

One of the first challenges was being surrounded by the ever-present ghostwriters from Life magazine, which had gotten the right to exclusive coverage of the first seven astronauts and their families. Three Life reporters were assigned full time to the story, Koppel writes, and the wives found themselves shadowed everywhere.

"The girls found their real selves disappearing behind Life 's depiction of what it meant to be not only the perfect fifties housewife, but the perfect astronaut's wife," Koppel writes. "The wives felt keenly the pressure to do everything just so, now that the whole country was watching them."

Another challenge was how to handle the indiscretions of macho husbands who had become rock stars and household names. Louise Shepard tried to ignore the fact that Alan was a skirt-chaser. “I’m the one he really loves,” she told the other wives.

Harriet Eisele, though, refused to ignore husband Donn’s constant playing around, including catching him in their own bedroom kissing another woman. When she finally confronted him about his behavior, he told her she was crazy. “If I’m crazy I should see a psychiatrist,” she said. “You can’t,” Donn told her. “I’ll lose my job.”

He lost it anyway after divorcing Harriet to remarry, and made headlines when Harriet sued him in what stories called “the first space divorce.”

It had been what author Koppel calls “a patriotic duty to keep one’s marriage together,” but Harriet’s divorce “opened the floodgates,” she writes. Out of the families of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts — a total of 30 — only seven couples stayed together.

There were, of course, glamorous aspects to being wed to an astronaut. They were wined and dined by rich Houstonians, including Joanne Herring (played by Julia Roberts in Charlie Wilson's War ). They had tea in the White House with Jackie Kennedy and became fashion icons. They were all invited to the Apollo 11 Moon Ball in Los Angeles celebrating Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon, where guests included Charles Lindbergh, Howard Hughes and Aristotle Onassis.

The lives of the astronauts’ wives make interesting reading, and Koppel has done an impressive job of research and writing. She thinks they should be remembered for the mostly thankless roles they played in their husbands’ historic adventures.

“If not for the wives, the strong women in the background who provided essential support to their husbands, man might never have walked on the moon,” she concludes.

Elizabeth Bennett, a freelance writer, interviewed several of the wives in the early 1970s for The Houston Post.

[email protected]

The Astronaut Wives Club

Lily Koppel

(Grand Central, $28)

Plan your life

Lily Koppel will appear Friday as part of Authors at the Adolphus, 1321 Commerce St., Dallas. Registration at 11:30 a.m.; luncheon at noon. $80, inclusive. Reservations required at 214-651-3503 or online at hoteladolphus.com/calendar-of-events.

dallasnews Administrator

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the astronaut wives club.

When America entered the space race, a new era began and a new kind of American hero emerged. These fighter pilots, test pilots and military men were selected, the first seven from a field of over a hundred men, to train as astronauts. They would eventually ride powerful rockets into outer space and put their very lives on the line to prove that man could indeed conquer another formidable frontier: space. They were the best of the best --- physically, mentally and emotionally able to withstand a grueling training program. That program and the toll it extracted on the astronauts’ families would certainly challenge and test their wives in ways to which no one had given much, if any, thought. NASA insisted on happy, solid marriages for the men they chose to conquer the heavens. Naturally, it fell upon the wives to create and maintain this image of a perfect union.

"Although the wives were (and still are) less well known, their stories are told quite frankly. They deserve a lot of respect and credit for the way they conducted themselves in the public eye during a very difficult, challenging and exciting time in their lives."

Lily Koppel’s book is about those wives, the young women who were left behind for long periods of time. It was up to them to raise their children, mow their lawns and live in a fishbowl, all the while smiling and being supportive of their spouses. Once the first set of astronauts had been named, their wives also became instant celebrities. One day, they were military wives and mothers living ordinary lives like everyone else they knew. The next day, they were being followed around the supermarket by a horde of reporters. Life  had received, for a hefty fee that would enrich the finances of the astronauts’ families, exclusive rights to follow them around, take photos of their children, and, for all practical purposes, destroy any privacy they previously had. The space program did not give the wives any pointers on how to manage the press, when they could/should turn down a reporter's personal question, or how to refuse a photo session. The women were expected to appear perfectly groomed and be gracious, no matter what.

The men were away training much of the time, so naturally the women turned to one another for companionship. They forged tight bonds because they spent so much time together dealing with the loneliness and worries that were uniquely due to their husbands' jobs. No one else really understood the way their lives had changed already, to say nothing of how their lives would be turned upside down if the unspeakable happened to any of their husbands. Some of the wives actually enjoyed being in the public eye, while others hated having reporters camped out on their front lawn. They formed their own unofficial club, a rather exclusive club with only one rule: if you need us, come.

Life in a fishbowl is not pleasant unless one is a fish. There were moments when the wives competed with one another. Each wanted her husband to be the first to travel into space or land on the moon. Some of the astronauts strayed from their marriage vows, and there were resentments. One wife hid her previous divorce. Still, there were considerable perks offered to and accepted by the astronaut couples. Who wouldn't want to rent a Cadillac for one dollar a year? Who wouldn't want to be invited to tea at the White House with Jackie Kennedy? Who wouldn't want to ride in a ticker-tape parade in New York City?

THE ASTRONAUT WIVES CLUB covers the first several space missions and the astronauts’ families. Much attention is given to Mercury Seven, the first mission and possibly the best known. Stories about Gus Grissom, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter --- whom Americans think they know --- populate the book and bring history to life. Although the wives were (and still are) less well known, their stories are told quite frankly. They deserve a lot of respect and credit for the way they conducted themselves in the public eye during a very difficult, challenging and exciting time in their lives.

Reviewed by Carole Turner on June 14, 2013

The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel

• Publication Date: June 11, 2013
• Genres: History , Nonfiction
• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• ISBN-10: 1455503258
• ISBN-13: 9781455503254

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THE ASTRONAUT WIVES CLUB

A true story.

by Lily Koppel ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2013

Insightful social history with a light touch.

Koppel ( The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life through the Pages of a Lost Journal , 2008, etc.) explores the cohesiveness of a group of wives who formed an unofficial support group and their individual development during the early years of the Cold War.

With the announcement on April 9, 1959, of the “nation’s first astronauts,” the women’s lives changed, as they became instant celebrities along with their husbands. From Project Mercury to the Apollo program and the moon landings, the author traces how the lives of the wives of the original astronauts were transformed by these developments. Ubiquitous reporters, anxious to cover their most intimate moments, and their new status as American icons, intruded into every aspect of their daily lives. Being impeccably groomed became yet another challenge to their existence as de facto single mothers; their husbands were away training for their missions into space. Although they were familiar with the typical stresses facing the wives of career military officers—their husbands’ long absences (sometimes on dangerous missions), poor pay, dismal living quarters, frequent moves and more—this public exposure was a first. They had their own part to play in a less obvious aspect of winning the Cold War: the public-relations offensive. The wives were guests at the White House and joined their husbands on international goodwill tours, showcasing the much-envied American lifestyle. Not only were astronauts judged by their own performance, but their wives and children were also rated. Koppel describes their appearance on the pages of  Life  magazine, looking like “scoops of ice cream” in their “pressed pastel shirtwaists.” The glamor of Jackie Kennedy was a welcome change, and they enjoyed the perks that came with celebrity, including a lucrative contract with  Life .

Pub Date: June 11, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-4555-0325-4

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: April 16, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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The Astronaut Wives Club : Book summary and reviews of The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel

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The Astronaut Wives Club

A True Story

by Lily Koppel

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Published Jun 2013 288 pages Genre: Biography/Memoir Publication Information

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Book summary.

As America's Mercury Seven astronauts were launched on death-defying missions, television cameras focused on the brave smiles of their young wives. Overnight, these women were transformed from military spouses into American royalty. They had tea with Jackie Kennedy, appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and quickly grew into fashion icons. Annie Glenn, with her picture-perfect marriage, was the envy of the other wives; platinum-blonde Rene Carpenter was proclaimed JFK's favorite; and licensed pilot Trudy Cooper arrived on base with a secret. Together with the other wives they formed the Astronaut Wives Club, meeting regularly to provide support and friendship. Many became next-door neighbors and helped to raise each other's children by day, while going to glam parties at night as the country raced to land a man on the Moon. As their celebrity rose - and as divorce and tragic death began to touch their lives they continued to rally together, and the wives have now been friends for more than fifty years. The Astronaut Wives Club tells the real story of the women who stood beside some of the biggest heroes in American history.

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"Starred Review. [An] entertaining and quirky throwback...This is truly a great snapshot of the times." - Publishers Weekly "Insightful social history with a light touch." - Kirkus Reviews "The author's aim was to uncover the real lives behind the "perfect" astronaut wives, and she hits the mark, crafting an exceptional story that seriously examines the imperfection and humanity of America's heroic astronauts, their wives, and their families. This work will hold vast appeal." - Library Journal "The only thing more delicious than the idea for this book is its execution. Come, all you Mad Men lovers, you girl-bonding-opus fans, you amateur historians who've looked under rugs for unlikely heroines... The Astronaut Wives Club rockets us back to the innocence of a unified mid-century America's space race triumphalism and to an unselfconscious sisterhood-is-powerful in the bud-nice things to recall, and maybe take a tiny bit of heed from, in these more sophisticated but much more complicated times." - Sheila Weller, author of Girls Like Us "If you thought the only heroes in the history of NASA were its astronauts; if you thought the all-American family regularly seen in the pages of Life magazine was the full story of those astronauts' private lives; and if you've ever dreamed of supersonic romance, dinners at the Kennedy White House, through-the-roof beehives, a group of friends and neighbors going through this crazy time with you, and a celebrity hero husband who is the most admired man in the nation (yet, could die at any minute) ... then you're ready to sign up for Lily Koppel's thrilling, magical, nostalgic, and eye-opening Atlas rocket of a read, The Astronaut Wives Club ." - Craig Nelson, bestselling author of Rocket Men and The Age of Radiance " The Astronaut Wives Club is a fun-loving romp about the devoted women behind NASA's herculean Moon Shot effort. Lily Koppel writes with humor, cunning, and integrity. I found her recounting of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs riveting. Highly recommend!" - Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Rice University and author of Cronkite " The Astronaut Wives Club is spectacular, both in its intimacy and its reach. Lily Koppel pulls out delicious behind the scenes details of the stresses, formalities, pleasures and travails of being the women behind the men on the moon." - Karen Abbott, bestselling author of American Rose and Sin in the Second City )

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Author Information

Lily koppel.

Lily Koppel is the bestselling author of The Red Leather Diary . She has written for The New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Huffington Post, and Glamour.

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Astronaut Wives Club (Koppel)

The Astronaut Wives Club:  A True Story Lily Koppel, 2013 Grand Central Publishing 320 pp. ISBN-13: 9781455503247 Summary As America's Mercury Seven astronauts were launched on death-defying missions, television cameras focused on the brave smiles of their young wives. Overnight, these women were transformed from military spouses into American royalty. They had tea with Jackie Kennedy, appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and quickly grew into fashion icons. Annie Glenn, with her picture-perfect marriage, was the envy of the other wives; platinum-blonde Rene Carpenter was proclaimed JFK's favorite; and licensed pilot Trudy Cooper arrived on base with a secret. Together with the other wives they formed the Astronaut Wives Club, meeting regularly to provide support and friendship. Many became next-door neighbors and helped to raise each other's children by day, while going to glam parties at night as the country raced to land a man on the Moon. As their celebrity rose—and as divorce and tragic death began to touch their lives—they continued to rally together, and the wives have now been friends for more than fifty years. The Astronaut Wives Club tells the real story of the women who stood beside some of the biggest heroes in American history. ( From the publisher .) Watch a video of the astronaut wives .

Author Bio • Birth—1981 • Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA • Education—B.A., Barnard College • Currently—lives in New York, New York Lily Koppel is a writer living in New York. She is known for her books, The Astronaut Wives Club (2013) and The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal (2008). Astronaut Wives traces the lives and marriages of the wives of the nation's astronauts from 1969-1971. Red Leather Diary is about her discovery of a young woman’s diary, kept in New York in the 1930s, and its return to Florence Wolfson Howitt, its owner, at age 90. The diary was recovered from a steamer trunk found in a dumpster outside of Koppel's apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The non-fiction book is based on Koppel's New York Times City section cover story. Koppel writes for the New York Times and other publications. She graduated from Barnard College in 2003 with a degree in English Literature and creative writing. Koppel began contributing reporting to the New York Times "Boldface Names" celebrity column in 2003. She has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America and National Public Radio. ( From .)

Book Reviews A fair and accomplished reporter...Lily Koppel offers a grounded, irresistible and sociable social history.... Koppel's book deftly delivers The Wife Stuff.../ Koppel does an excellent job of capturing a group portrait with enough highlights, low points, sunny spots and shadows for individual features to emerge.... The Astronaut Wives Club is wholly and consistently in Koppel's voice: smart, evocative, informed and warm-an electric fireside chat with the women who put men on the moon. Chicago Tribune The men catapulted into space in the 20th century were interesting, sort of. The women they left back on earth were fascinating.... A lively account of how the wives coped with fame, fear, [and] loneliness. People This is one of those light, tasty summer reads you'll guzzle down like a milk shake. Entertainment Weekly [A] true (juicy) story. Gotta love non-fiction that feels like a beach read: Lily Koppel's The Astronaut Wives Club chronicles the wives of 1960s astronauts.... Put down that mystery and pick up some history! Redbook In this entertaining and quirky throwback, journalist Koppel revisits the ladies who cheered and bolstered their men to victory in the U.S. space program..., revealing public triumph and rarely private agony. Koppel looks at the history of the race to space...focusing on the wives...[who] had to be gracious to the Life magazine reporters who invaded their homes, concealing unpleasant domestic details..., and unseemly competition with other wives.... This is truly a great snapshot of the times. Publishers Weekly The author's aim was to uncover the real lives behind the "perfect" astronaut wives, and she hits the mark, crafting an exceptional story that seriously examines the imperfection and humanity of America's heroic astronauts, their wives, and their families. — Crystal Goldman, San Jose State Univ. Lib., CA Library Journal Mad Men fans and history buffs alike won't want to miss a new book about...the lives of the astronauts' wives.... We meet the Mercury Seven women in the first chapter of The Astronaut Wives Club , and author Lily Koppel does a nice job of staying close to their stories. By the time you see the women's faces in the pictures, you'll feel like you're a member of the gang.... It's hard to believe no one has already written their story, and this reader is glad Koppel finally did. BookPage Koppel explores the cohesiveness of a group of wives who formed an unofficial support group and their individual development during the early years of the Cold War. With the announcement on April 9, 1959, of the "nation's first astronauts," the women's lives changed, as they became instant celebrities along with their husbands.... Koppel describes their appearance on the pages of Life magazine, looking like "scoops of ice cream" in their "pressed pastel shirtwaists."... Insightful social history with a light touch. Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book: • How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips) • Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction • Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart) Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Astronaut Wives Club : 1. Talk about the lives of the different women covered in the book. Whom did you most sympathize with, admire, or dislike? 2. What did you find most impressive regarding the level of support the women provided one another? Is there anything in your own life that resembles the bond that developed among the astronaut wives? 3. Discuss the various stresses the women were under: the invasion of privacy, the absense of husbands, the not infrequent infidelity, and  the anxiety for their husbands' lives. What was most difficult? What would you have found most difficult. Do you find any aspect of their lives enviable? Were the lives of the astronaut spouses any more difficult than other spouses whose husbands or wives go off to war? 4. Talk about Betty Grissom, Pat White and Martha Chaffee—the widows of the three men who were burned alive during a pre-launch test of their Apollo 1 mission. How did each woman handle the horrific tragedy? Pat White was considered "the final victim of the Apollo 1 fire," writes Lily Koppel. Is there any way in which Pat White's life might have had a better ending? 5. Talk about the marital relationships within the couples. Which marriages did you find solid and which were troubling...and why? Were you surprised at the number of marriages that ultimately failed? 6. To what degree, if any, might the lives of these women be different today given the change in society's attitudes toward women? Consider, for instance, their reactions to the Life magazine article:

The wives were completely shocked, worrying about how America would judge them. They would never wear such a bold colored lipstick. They were mothers, not vixens .

( Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks .)

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The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story

By Lily Koppel

As America's Mercury Seven astronauts were launched on death-defying missions, television cameras focused on the brave smiles of their young wives. Overnight, these women were transformed from military spouses into American royalty. They had tea with Jackie Kennedy, appeared on the ... show more

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The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel

• Publication Date: June 11, 2013
• Genres: History , Nonfiction
• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• ISBN-10: 1455503258
• ISBN-13: 9781455503254
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Book Review: Astronaut Wive's Club

• July 6, 2014
• Book Reviews , Book Reviews: Non-Fiction
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Category: Non-Fiction Reviewed by: Clifford R. McMurray From Ad Astra Summer 2014 Title: The Astronaut Wives Club Author: Lily Koppel NSS Amazon link for this book Format: Paperback/Kindle Pages: 320 Publisher: Grand Central Publishing Date: June, 2013 Retail Price: $17.00/$9.99 ISBN: 978-1455503247

Yes, it really was a club. Its first official meeting was held in 1966, after the third group of astronauts had arrived in Houston. It had existed informally since the Mercury Seven were picked in 1958, and it had some elements in common with the Officers’ Wives Clubs that had been a part of its members’ lives before their husbands came to NASA, while they were military test pilots. But Marge Slayton (“Mother Marge” to the rest of the wives) threw “The Right Stuff” across the room when she read Tom Wolfe’s description of the AWC as just another OWC.

It was less organized, for one thing. And the wives were feeling their way into new roles as celebrities, just as their husbands were. Nothing could prepare the astronauts or their families for the level of public scrutiny they would be subjected to from the moment NASA announced them to the press. The paparazzi that movie stars have to deal with today are tame compared to the press corps of 1959; when the original Mercury astronauts were introduced to the world, photographers and reporters tracked their wives down in supermarkets and on the beach, and walked into their homes uninvited. When they moved to their new headquarters in Houston and built new homes, Gus Grissom and Wally Schirra made sure their houses had no windows on the side facing the street.

Fame had its perks, too. The families of the first astronauts were used to living on military pilot salaries of $7,000 a year. The $500,000 deal they made with Life magazine for exclusive access to their personal stories bought them some privacy from the rest of the press, and gave them more money than any of them had ever seen before. It was just the beginning; they got leases on sports cars for one dollar per year, and housing developers around the Manned Spacecraft Center built houses for them at cost, just to have them as residents in the new suburbs.

Most of the perks went to the men, though. Their wives might get to go to the White House for tea with Jackie Kennedy after their flights, and enjoy an upscale social life in Houston when their husbands were at home, but the astronauts weren’t home very much. They put in long days training, many of them at the Cape or other NASA contractor locations. After Gus Grissom was killed in the Apollo One fire, Betty Grissom confessed, “Well, I’m going to miss the phone calls. That’s mostly what I had of him.”

The wives were left to raise the children and run the households alone. Mostly unspoken when they got together was the knowledge that their husbands had groupies, just like rock stars, to tempt them whenever they were away from home. The “Cape Cookies” were an offstage threat to their marriages.

Many books have been written about the astronauts, but this is the first book to tell the story of the strong women they left at home. America expected them to be as perfect as the public image of their husbands. They coped with humor, like the satirical stand-up routine Rene Carpenter made up about an interview between Nancy the Newscaster and astronaut wife Primly Stable. They learned their parts: they were always “proud, thrilled, and happy” after a successful launch. They learned to be diplomats, as Trudy Cooper did when on a goodwill tour after Gemini 5 the Emir of Nigeria asked her and Gordon if they’d mind leaving their teenage daughters to join his harem. They stuffed their frustrations into the closet when their husbands came home, fearing that any discord could cause the astronauts to lose their focus and perhaps get them killed in a business that promised to be as risky as the riskiest test flying. And over time, living side by side in the three Houston suburbs they called “Togethersville,” they became closer to each other than the wives in any Officers’ Wives Club.

The strain of putting up a good front was ratcheted up after the Apollo One fire killed three of their husbands in a prelaunch simulation. Susan Borman became a closet alcoholic, and other wives dealt with their fears as best they could. The astronauts, if they weren’t oblivious to their wives’ inner torment, certainly seemed that way. “You just worry about the custard, and I’ll worry about the flying,” was Frank Borman’s best attempt to reassure Susan.

For some idea of how intense the pressure on the families of the first astronauts was, consider that the 30 members of the first three groups were all married, and within a few years after the last Apollo flight only seven were still married. Death in training accidents had made seven of the wives widows, and 16 more were divorced. The training and the flights had been so intense and taken the astronauts away from home so much of the time in those years, that when the Apollo program ended many of the couples found themselves strangers to each other.

As Gene Cernan told author Lily Koppel, “all of these incredible wives should be in the history books.” Koppel has told their story straight up, not as a tabloid tale. The reader will come away from this book knowing these women as individuals, not as anonymous faces in Life magazine. ABC is adapting Koppel’s book as an upcoming limited run television series. In Houston, the successors to the Mercury Seven, the New Nine, and the Fourteen may take the time to watch the series with their families, and thank their lucky stars that they’ve been spared the curse of celebrity.

Clifford R. McMurray is a former executive vice president of the National Space Society.

© 2014 Clifford R. McMurray

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Obsessed TV Report Card: The Astronaut Wives Club

By Megan Angelo

Here is my main take-away from episode one of ABC's The Astronaut Wives Club , a gauzy period drama based on the book of the same name: It was good to be an astronaut's wife in the '60s. And also, it was bad to be an astronaut's wife in the '60s.

The premiere is wholly devoted to setting up that dichotomy. You'll burst with pride over being married to an instant icon, but you'll worry endlessly that he'll blow up leaving the stratosphere. You'll get to go to swanky parties, but you'll have to talk to other women you (for some reason) immediately regard as your competition. Life magazine will follow you and take your picture and encourage America to fawn over you, but down at Cape Canaveral, your husbands are partying with girls in bikinis gone starry-eyed over spacemen.

It's a fascinating place to start a show, but it should feel more fascinating than it actually does, probably because Club 's ensemble is just too big. Seven "main" characters are a lot to keep track of, and this is coming from someone who's reading Judy Blume's new 20-something-narrators book. Having so many wives competing for screen time means that each of them is forced to wear her defining quality (the hot one! the ambitious one! the cold one!) like a name tag so we can see who we're dealing with. So the dynamic unfolds with all the subtlety of a rocket launch.

The other challenge, in terms of watching these women as a woman in 2015, is figuring out which of their attitudes are actually emblematic of the times, and which are just counting on the housedress era to justify them. Certainly, the across-the-board obedience (not love, in every case, but obedience for sure) of their husbands feels right out of a retro handbook. But I'm not sure that the instant suspicion the women all feel toward one another can be explained away by the era. (Their first meeting as a group devolves into a snapping match within two minutes—and, depressingly, it's over whose husband is best.) Nor does the time period excuse the self-absorption this group uniformly suffers from. We're better than halfway through the pilot when they realize one of them hasn't spoken a single word because she stutters. The talent—JoAnna Garcia Swisher, Odette Annable, Zoe Boyle, Erin Cummings, Yvonne Strahovski, Azure Parsons, and Dominique McElligott—are all likable, but their alter-egos have some catching up to do.

Of course, all of this is a great place to start if everyone is about to change, and seeing as Club comes from Gossip Girl 's Stephanie Savage, I plan on sticking around to see the stories take off. Even if these women spend all of season one being forced into good-homemaking-lady public behavior, I expect a little gumption and adventure behind closed doors. Your men are headed to the moon , ladies. Don't just sit and wait up for them.

PS—Read Jess's Q+A with the wonderful JoAnna Garcia Swisher here .

Spacemen aren't the only things hidden in the stars:

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