Deke ! U.S. Manned Space From Mercury to the Shuttle
For 20 years Slayton, one of the original Mercury astronauts, ran the Astronaut Office at the Manned Spacecraft (later Johnson) Space Center in Houston, a position he assumed after being pulled off his Mercury flight for a minor heart ailment. In that capacity, he played a central role in selecting new astronauts and especially in assembling flight crews. In these posthumously published memoirs, he gives his account of those early years of U.S. manned spaceflight. Compared with the recent Moonshot (LJ 4/15/94), which he coauthored, this book allows the reader to get a sense of the man, of how a farm boy from Wisconsin ended up deciding who would be the first man on the moon and who finally, at the age of 51, got his own spaceflight on the Apollo Soyuz mission-the last Apollo flown. As another valuable addition to the recent first-hand accounts of NASA's early days, this book is highly recommended for public and academic libraries.Thomas J. Frieling, Bainbridge Coll., Ga.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.