lan Shepard was the brashest, cockiest, and most flamboyant of America’s original Mercury Seven, but he was also regarded as the best. Intense, colorful, and dramatic—the man who hit a golf ball on the moon—he was among the most private of America’s public figures and, until his death in 1998, he guarded the story of his life zealously.
Light This Candle, based on Neal Thompson’s exclusive access to private papers and interviews with Shepard’s family and closest friends—including John Glenn, Wally Schirra, and Gordon Cooper—offers a riveting, action-packed account of Shepard’s life. Among the first men to fly off aircraft carriers, he was one of the most fearless test pilots. He endured long separations from his devoted wife and three daughters to fly dangerous missions, working his way up the ranks despite clashes with authority over his brazen flying maneuvers and penchant for risky pranks. Hugely competitive, he beat out John Glenn for the first Mercury spaceflight and then overcame a rare illness to return to space again on Apollo 14.
He took every challenge head-on and seemed to win every time.
Long overdue, Light This Candle is a candid and inspiring account of a bold American life.
Ever since my high school English teacher suggested I had some talent, I'd dreamed of the writer's life. In college, a drunk-Irish professor/priest further stoked the dream, and in 1988 I found myself happily employed as a newspaper reporter. Twenty years later, I'm still a professional writer, but the circumstances have changed. Instead of working 9-5 (more like 6-6, most days) at one of the nation's sadly struggling newspapers, I'm self-employed. That means I'm writing, thinking about writing, or feeling guilty about not writing, all the time. Writing is my hobby, my career, my obsession. If not for my family, I'd likely be writing (and reading, and probably drinking) day and night. I'm not proud of that. It's a problem, trying constantly to improve my work (and boost my income), while striving to be a good dad, husband, person. Balancing work against the rest of my life seems to get harder all the time.
One problem I've often wrestled with is finding the right balance between the artistic and the structural. I've felt strongly that writing can't be a strictly artistic endeavor. Like the construction job I'd held as a teen, working as a mason's helper, the simple formula is usually brick by brick by brick. Of course, there's room for art in masonry, too (see: Colliseum), and that's where the formula gets complicated. One lingering question of my career has been: how can writers create something meaningful and compelling, but remain productive and efficient? I've dedicated my career as writer (and teacher) to filling my toolbox with the best tools, my playbook with the best tactics.
Fifteen years as a journalist flew by like this: Philadelphia Inquirer (a year); Roanoke Times & World-News, in southwest Virginia (3 years); St. Petersburg Times (less than a year - marriage intervened); The Bergen Record, in northern New Jersey (3 years); and the Baltimore Sun, which I left in 2002, after 5 years. I've also written for Outside, Esquire, Men's Health, Backpacker, Sports Illustrated and the Washington Post Magazine, and newspapers such as the Christian Science Monitor. And I've taught workshops and seminars, incuding three years with the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina-Asheville.
As a journalist, the issue of art-slash-poetry versus structure-slash-efficiency was often governed by a daily deadline. I had no choice but to submit the best-built story by 6 or 7 p.m. If I started early enough in the day, I could add some flair, a bit of me. But usually, the stories were merely functional, and therefore ephemeral, and this often troubled me. I bristled against the limits of daily journalism, the narrow just-the-facts focus, and frequently nagged editors to let me write longer, more meaningful stories, the kind of "narrative non-fiction" found in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Outside, and Sports Illustrated. Similarly, as an author, I've aspired to achieve the kind of non-fiction storytelling on display in such books as Friday Night Lights, The Perfect Storm, and Seabiscuit.
During my final two years at the Baltimore Sun, I began researching my first book, Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard, America's First Spaceman (Crown, 2004). I then left the Sun and moved to North Carolina to research and write my next book, Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels and the Birth of NASCAR (Crown, 2006). That was followed by Hurricane Season: A Coach, His Team, and their Triumph in the Time of Katrina (Free Press, 2007). In mid-2010, I'm working on my fourth book, a biography of the eccentric world-traveling cartoonist Robert "Believe it or Not" Ripley. [See reviews, excerpts, photos and videos at NealThompson.com]
This review is from: Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (Hardcover)
To anyone but a true student of spaceflight history, this might be regarded as a superb biography of an extraordinary man, and it certainly comes very close. Neal Thompson has a punchy, smooth-running style, which obviously reflects his lengthy career as a professional journalist, but just like a journalist it seems he kept his manuscript to himself and well under wraps, and I believe this has proved a sad downfall for an otherwise excellent book. People who know their spaceflight stuff are thick on the ground, but it is very obvious that no one was consulted in order to simply verify the so-called facts about Shepard's NASA career in this book. There are so many elementary errors inherent in this part of the story that it must call into question the reliability of other areas such as his military service, and he deserves better.
The author's descriptions of early spacecraft are incorrect; so too his explanations of the dynamics of space flight and the space environment. I know helicopter pilot Jim Lewis well enough to say that he would be absolutely furious with Thompson's baseless assumption that Gus Grissom blamed Lewis for nearly letting him drown after the hatch blew on his spacecraft. Quite the contrary - Lewis was elsewhere making a valiant but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to save Liberty Bell 7. Any fundamental study of this dramatic event would reveal that Lewis's helicopter did not in fact retrieve Grissom as stated in the book, and his was not the only helicopter on the scene - there were actually three involved. I also feel that far more effort should have been made to research the Mercury flight of Scott Carpenter, rather than reiterating bitter and biased recollections dominating Chris Kraft's account of this flight in his own book. Carpenter successfully brought home a flawed, badly malfunctioning spacecraft, but where is this story? It seems a much-misrepresented confrontation between two personalities is a better scenario to present than the program-saving heroics and expertise of a gentle, courageous astronaut.
The author says he elicited the help of Alan Shepard's family in writing this book, and while I do not doubt the veracity of this statement, I wonder if they feel betrayed by many of the vapid sex "revelations" he felt obliged to relate, which only serve to make this book a poor man's "Right Stuff." I, for one, did not care to know the intimate details of Alan and Louise Shepard's first night together as man and wife. This was just guesswork, voyeuristic journalism at its most revolting, and has no place in such a serious biography. It would also, I am sure, have proved very distressing to the daughters, and such odious reporting is precisely why Shepard would not divulge his life story before he died, and why family members have never cooperated with journalists or biographers before now - and probably never will again. The author also rebuts the whole Shepard/Glenn conflict matrix he carefully makes throughout the book by saying that Shepard was panicked into seeking Glenn's counsel on a delicate matter. This goes absolutely against the grain of both personalities, as pointed out numerous times in his own book. Research and sources please, Mr. Author, not the presentation of presumptions as facts based simply on third-party and questionable hearsay.
My sincere wish is that the author had just allowed someone with a solid knowledge of spaceflight dynamics and history to read the text before he rushed this book into print, because the presence of numerous errors and typos only serves to diminish the full impact of what might have been a truly good biography.
An Australian called Clive James once penned a great book called "Unreliable Memoirs," and I'm afraid this is an alternate title I would have to apply to this book. Nevertheless, it still merits 4 out of 5 for readability, and for finally bringing us the incredible (albeit author-flawed) story of America's first man in space. We can only hope that a corrective rewrite is in the offing. Then, I'm sure, I can probably add that fifth star to the overall rating.
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This review is from: Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (Hardcover)
On the one hand, this is a long-overdue biography of an American hero who never did make things easy for biographers. It shows us where Shepard came from, and how he wound up riding a fifteen-minute lob over the Atlantic, and playing golf on the moon, and it makes for fascinating reading.
Unfortunately, the book is somewhat marred by numerous errors of detail that any expert on manned spaceflight history could have caught, and the occasional annoyingly awkward turn of phrase that any competent copy editor should have caught. Together, these give the author a less-than-authoritative tone. Then, too, even the typography of the book is slightly annoying: for the chapter titles and the page headers, somebody picked a truly ugly and amateurish-looking font, one that doesn't belong in any book.
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This review is from: Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (Hardcover)
I had been meaning to read this long-overdue biography of Alan Shepard, and I happened to pick it up in a cruise ship library. As I read it I was surprised at the number of factual inaccuracies--there is at least one glaring non-technical error per chapter, which calls into question almost everything else between the covers. Numerous reviews here mention more problems with technical aspects of the book that I was unaware of, but which do not surprise me given the apparent lack of proofreading and fact-checking.
An example: upon finding the book, I leafed through it and found the section on Apollo 14. There it mentioned that John Glenn had "almost killed himself when he lost control of the pace car at the Daytona 500 and slammed into a flatbed trailer crowded with journalists." This sentence boggled my mind, for it contained two errors: the pace car was at the Indianapolis 500, and John Glenn was a passenger while a local Dodge dealership owner was the driver. The book is just full of examples of this kind of sloppy reporting.
Edit: I see that at least the paperback edition correctly says Indianapolis 500, but it still incorrectly implies that Glenn was driving the pace car.
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