Carrying the Fire is Michael Collins' account of the first moon landing. He has the right to tell it, as he was the closest to the story without actually landing on the moon, having been the pilot of the Command Service Module Columbia. He remained in the Columbia and orbited the moon waiting for Armstrong and Aldrin to land, walk, then return to the capsule for the trip home.

Collins does an admirable job telling the story and he does it from the point of view--and, more entertaining for me--in the voice of a fighter pilot-turned test pilot-turned astronaut. That voice, and the comments that come from it, were by far the best quality of the book for me. They were most pronounced in two areas. The first was his expressed joy at being alone in the Columbia on the back side of the moon, separated by hundreds of thousands of miles from the three billion people of earth and with no radio contact with anyone--either the mission controllers or his two crew mates on the moon's surface. Single-seat fighter pilots will identify with that joy.

The second was his antipathy to flight surgeons (you can only break even if you go to see them.) This subject cropped up several times in his narrative from the funny story of his ejection from an F-86, finding his own way back to the base, making the necessary trip to the flight surgeon only to be told, "No doctor! Big crash and doctor's out looking!" to the detailed and hard description of their physicals in the astronaut selection process, to his and all the other astronauts frustration with being hooked up to heart monitors during spaceflight ("I'll let you know if I stop breathing," was his response to an inoperative sensor late in his Apollo 11 flight). In the end, he understood and appreciated their work--a surgeon fixed a major neck injury, which surgery disrupted his place on Apollo 8 and landed him on the history-making Apollo 11. Though he understood the necessity, he didn't have to like it.

I rated the book three stars because Collins' editor was asleep at the switch. At 478 pages, the book is about half again longer than it should be and there are hundreds of ways a good editor could have tightened the story and helped him move the narrative along. Is the description of Air Force manual "Notes, Cautions, and Warnings" necessary to the story? The contents of the 1960s Air Force jungle survival manual? Even the list of law enforcement background of the first group of astronaut candidates? No. All these and much, much more could have hit the cutting room floor without doing damage to the book. Quite the opposite. The book would have been better for it.

But, for understanding the life and experience of an astronaut at this most interesting time in American history, there isn't a better book out there. It's worth the read. ( )

Mike Collins' wrote his famous memoir himself. He is quite frank, including a list of his colleagues' personalities, and a bit of a kvetch, but he gives an exciting and in-depth account of his training, NASA politics, and both his Gemini and Apollo missions. ( )

The first 'astronaut biography' I've read, and now I'm concerned that it sets the bar too high! Collins pays a lot of attention to the details, but still finds the time to talk about more emotional and personal experiences. He's not afraid to be self deprecating, which is always appreciated in any biography. The additional author's foreword found in the 2009 edition is a nice bit of text that you'll miss with an earlier edition. ( )

Good story of the lunar landing in 1969. ( )

Fascinating ( )