Apollo 7: The NASA Mission Reports: Apogee Books Space Series 11
Another entry in Robert Godwin's detail-packed, armchair  astronaut NASA Reports series, the Apollo 7 compilation includes all the tech-heavy goodies that earlier installments featured: the official press kit, pre- and post-mission reports, the technical debriefing, dozens of diagrams and color photos, and even a CD-ROM packed with astronaut interviews, thundering launch footage, and 500 70mm pictures taken by the flight crew.Godwin's books are so addictive because they're the real deal--essentially unedited, unaltered artifacts from some of NASA's most hair-raising missions. And while Apollo 7 might not have matchedApollo 11or13for sheer drama, the crew of Wally Schirra, Walt Cunningham, and Donn Eisele had a lot on its hands. It was what would be the longest first flight of any craft in aviation history, the first successful manned launch of Wernher von Braun's Saturn IB rocket, and the first successful restart of the service module's hypergolic-propelled motor after a "cold soak" in space.Because there's no one to hold your hand through the details, the Godwin books can be daunting to casual readers. But that same rawness makes this report (like its predecessors) often very funny, fascinating, and revealing, whether it's complaints about head colds and congestion in the post-mission report, or just Wally Schirra waxing space-cowboy in the debriefing: "...I've had harder landings on a carrier landing. If you ever watch a guy land in a Demon, for example, his head goes bla-lah-lah lah-lah-lah as he rolls out on the flight deck. It's that bad."--Paul Hughes