For my Friday meme combo this week I have chosen a book I picked up today at my favourite second-hand bookstore, Bearly Used Books in Parry Sound. The book is Chris Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. I’ve been meaning to look for this for a while and the price was right today. GoodReads has the following description:
Colonel Chris Hadfield has spent decades training as an astronaut and has logged nearly 4000 hours in space. During this time he has broken into a Space Station with a Swiss army knife, disposed of a live snake while piloting a plane, and been temporarily blinded while clinging to the exterior of an orbiting spacecraft. The secret to Col. Hadfield’s success-and survival-is an unconventional philosophy he learned at NASA: prepare for the worst-and enjoy every moment of it.
In An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Col. Hadfield takes readers deep into his years of training and space exploration to show how to make the impossible possible. Through eye-opening, entertaining stories filled with the adrenaline of launch, the mesmerizing wonder of spacewalks, and the measured, calm responses mandated by crises, he explains how conventional wisdom can get in the way of achievement-and happiness. His own extraordinary education in space has taught him some counterintuitive lessons: don’t visualize success, do care what others think, and always sweat the small stuff.
You might never be able to build a robot, pilot a spacecraft, make a music video or perform basic surgery in zero gravity like Col. Hadfield. But his vivid and refreshing insights will teach you how to think like an astronaut, and will change, completely, the way you view life on Earth-especially your own.
Now for this week’s excerpts:
Book Beginnings is hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader, who invites anyone to join in, saying: ‘Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires. Please remember to include the title of the book and the author. Leave a link to your post. If you don’t have a blog, but want to participate, please leave a comment with your Book Beginning.’
The beginning of An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth:
The windows of a spaceship casually frame miracles. Every 92 minutes, another sunrise: a layer cake that starts orange, then a thick wedge of blue, then the richest, darkest icing decorated with stars.
Chris Hadfield has lived the kind of life most of us could only dream of, so I’m glad he’s written this book to share some of that with us. I like this beginning and I’m looking forward to reading this one soon.
The Friday 56 is a book meme hosted by Freda’s Voice and the rules are as follows:
*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post below in Linky. Add the post url, not your blog url.
It’s that simple.
From page 56 of An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth:
Finally everyone agreed that it had been a false alarm, and we headed back to our sleep stations. An hour later, when the fire alarm sounded again, we repeated the warn, gather, work protocol just as before.
I guess that any kind of alarm when you’re way out in space would be quite unnerving, but I guess he survived and lived to tell the tale! Hopefully I’ll get around to reading this one soon. I don’t want it sitting on my ever-growing TBR pile for ever.