Too Far From Home: A Story of Life and Death in Space (Hardcover)

by Chris Jones (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
When the space shuttle Columbia broke up during its re-entry into Earth's atmosphere in February 2003, two American astronauts were still aboard the International Space Station, along with a Russian flight engineer. With further NASA flights suspended for months, perhaps years, questions began to emerge not only about how to bring the three men back, but how to provide them with enough supplies while they remained in space. Jones first wrote about the Expedition 6 team in an award-winning article for Esquire (where he is a contributing editor), and his story combines gripping narrative and strongly defined characters. Though extensive accounts of the Americans' backgrounds seems at first to put the brakes on, it's a necessary counterweight to parallel passages about the little-understood Russian space program—essential information because the three eventually took "an accelerated, lung-crushing dive" in a Soyuz capsule. In addition to that adventure, Jones's reporting is filled with details of life aboard the space station, from the amazing beauty of a space walk to the more mundane problem of "taking a crap" in zero gravity. That sort of frank talk enhances readers' identification with the astronauts, making their drama all the more engrossing. (Mar. 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
In an up-close and personal style, with occasional Tom Wolfe-like flourishes, Jones depicts the life of the modern astronaut who boards the space shuttle and flies to the International Space Station (ISS). The experience of launch and living in orbit receive all-questions-answered coverage, from making wills to eating to using the toilet, given as preliminaries to Jones' main drama: telling of the predicament of two Americans and a Russian who were aboard the ISS when the space shuttle Columbia was destroyed in February 2003. Although not exactly stranded by the subsequent suspension of shuttle flights--the ISS had a Soyuz lifeboat--Kenneth Bowersox, Don Pettit, and Nikolai Budarin had to adapt operationally and emotionally to an extended mission until, after terrestrials debated and dismissed the idea of abandoning the ISS, the Russians could launch a replacement crew. Jones, who obtained the cooperation of Bowersox and his crewmates, captures their feelings of separation from Earth and delivers space travel's ever-present risk in a kinetic rendering of their harrowing return home. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1 edition (March 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385514654
• ISBN-13: 978-0385514651
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #571,331 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Prose, March 14, 2007

By	Digit Head - See all my reviews

I am typically not a non-fiction reader. I bought the book for my husband and decided to read it first. I found myself quickly fascinated. The author takes some time to build a background of the astronauts that is essential to the story. In many instances the book reads like a novel, keeping me interested and focused. Pieces of history of the space program for the US and Russia are interspersed throughout, seamlessly blending with the story. The writing is beautiful. The author is able to spotlight the emotions of not only the astronauts who were "too far from home" but that of their wives as well. I highly recommended the book to anyone who loves stories about space and anyone else who just loves a good "story"!

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Even though I got the shivers just thinking about what they went through, I HAD to read it! , March 20, 2007

By	K. Corn "reviewer" (Indianapolis,, IN United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

Only someone in total denial would be able to believe that space travel isn't risky or potentially dangerous..and, of course, there's been plenty of deaths among astronauts - before takeoff, while in the air, etc. Books have been written about those events. So what makes this one a standout?
Somehow, almost seamlessly, this particular author (Chris Jones) manages to create a book that breaks the mold and writes a gripping account of three astronauts who were left stranded in space when the unexpected happened and the Columbia exploded, leaving them literally "lost in space.", with no obvious ride home.
This book combines so many genres and melds them into one compelling read. It is part memoir/biography (with the lives of the astronauts and their background revealed), part gripping tale of what went wrong and also a revealing look at life in space, with the kind of details that people may not have known before. It all seems so IMMEDIATE, so real, so "you were there" in writing style. I could not put it down and I am not normally a fan of books about space or space travel.
So if you're looking for something different from what you usually read, pick this up - and then share it with a friend. It is truly an excellent and engrossing book, although at times I did have to put it down because it was so intense. But I couldn't put it down for long!

28 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Space Geeks, Look Elsewhere, April 10, 2007

By	Terry Sunday (El Paso, Texas United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As much as I try not to generalize from limited data, I must make the following observation: sportswriters should stick to writing books about things they know, i.e., sports. Sportswriters should NOT try to write about technical subjects like spaceflight. The prime example of a book that should never have been written is "For All Mankind," by sportswriter Harry Hurt--the hands-down, all-time, worst-written, least accurate, most-full-of-breathtaking-technical errors spaceflight book ever. "Too Far From Home," by Chris Jones (also a sportswriter), is not nearly as bad, but it is still clear that the author doesn't understand some of the things he wrote about.

By the time I was 50 pages into "Too Far From Home," I was reeling from Mr. Jones' jarring, bizarre and oversimplified descriptions of spaceflight technology. Here are a few examples. He portrays NASA's early spacecraft as "corrugated-tin capsules held together by hardware-store screws." What an injustice to the nationwide team of dedicated engineers and technicians who built what were, at the time, state-of-the-art vehicles. How about this one: during the final few seconds before a shuttle launch, "the three main engines began gimbeling [sic], testing their directional thrust...throwing off a little push with each pull of the trigger..." Huh? What trigger? Who's pulling a trigger? It's a pre-programmed computer-controlled sequence. Here's another one. Just as the shuttle enters orbit: "...a loud clang signaled that the external fuel tank had been blown loose and begun to come apart..." Jones seems to think that the ET blows up as soon as it separates from the Orbiter. It doesn't--it stays intact until it re-enters atmosphere and burns up (mostly) half a world away from its release point.

Jones also apparently doesn't know much about airplanes. He describes air-to-air combat exercises in which missiles "punch holes through" the wings of drone aircraft, "maybe spilling a few gallons of hydraulic fluid." A hole in a wing is much more likely to release fuel, not hydraulic fluid, since that's where an airplane's fuel tanks usually are. Describing test pilot Ken Bowersox's "twin-engine beater" personal airplane, Jones says that the intrepid soon-to-be-astronaut "push[ed] his flying heap higher still, sometimes high enough to catch a glimpse of the curvature of the earth." There's no airplane except for the likes of the SR-71 that can fly high enough for its pilot to see the curvature of the earth. NO private plane can do so.

I was also taken aback by Jones' interminable use of off-the-wall similes to express concepts in ways that many readers might relate to, but that greatly sacrifice accuracy in the process. For example, I sincerely doubt that shuttle crewmembers seated in the mid-deck during launch think of themselves as "...hiding out like stowaways, like kids sneaking into a drive-in by getting locked in the trunk of a car." Locker-room and sports metaphors abound, which I found tiresome after a while, as I did his insistence on assigning motivations that he could not possibly know to virtually every person he writes about.

There is, of course, more to "Too Far From Home" than spaceflight hardware, and some readers will probably enjoy the human-interest stories. But in a field such as spaceflight, in which technology reigns supreme, an author should at least get the technology right. Jones often does not. I have to wonder why, and for whom, he wrote it. Space geeks will find it maddeningly simplified and sorely lacking in technical understanding, and need not bother reading it. I had to force myself to finish it. Casual readers may like its fast-paced, easygoing style, and may gain a little understanding of some aspects of spaceflight--but that understanding will likely echo the author's flawed knowledge. My recommendation to all readers is to give "Too Far From Home" a pass. There are many far superior spaceflight books available. I give it two stars just because it IS marginally better than "For All Mankind," which I rated with one star only because Amazon doesn't allow zero-star ratings.