posted 04-09-2004 06:09 AM               

Incidentally, Thompson could have done himself a big favour by asking a space historian to check his facts for him. While most of the book is quite good, there's also some very poor errors in there. Then again, who am I to talk?

posted 04-13-2004 01:07 PM               

Can you tell from the context, Colin, if the author is alluding to an early astronaut?

He probably meant Carpenter, and for some reason an exaggerated figure got into print. This makes sense, as the author may have wanted to make the larger, and somewhat ironic, point about Shepard, who for all his human and personal failings, was married only once to the beatific Louise. The author may also have been put out with Carpenter, who both declined to be interviewed and is vulnerable on the marital front.

posted 04-13-2004 01:25 PM               

That last post gave me an idea: perhaps Thompson read Carpenter's memoirs, recalled the business about "six" cars and "x" marriages getting totaled and simply keyboarded what he remembered, without checking back with the source material or asking the early astronaut himself.

posted 04-13-2004 03:16 PM               

Let's see, skipping wife no. 1 and a marriage of 23 years: Carpenter married wife no. 2 in 1973, ended in 1985; no. 3 ca. 1988, ended ca. 1991; wife no. 4 ca. 1998. That's only three wives over a span of 25 years; four wives over about 55 years.

And only two cars totaled, a 1934 Ford and a 1966 Chevy Impala.

I can't imagine who the author was thinking of. Seven wives?

posted 04-13-2004 08:21 PM               

Just because something will be difficult to do (like a bio of Al Shepard) doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. But it does make it, well, difficult.

posted 04-13-2004 09:38 PM            

However, if you continue to read the same paragraph, you find:

"Of the first forty married astronauts to fly in space, seven were divorced by the mid-seventies - roughly 18 percent."

So, I take this to read that Walt meant seven CUMULATIVE astronaut divorces in that time period - and Thompson had taken it to mean he was referring to an individual.

So I think this solves this mystery - no astronaut has been married more than four times.

posted 04-13-2004 10:18 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by ColinBurgess:
One point I do make is that some of his voyeuristic "revelations" about Shepard present to us the very reason why he and his family have never aided journalists and biographers in the past, and most likely never will again. How dare he presume to tell us what Al and Louise did on their wedding night? It was a low point of the book for me.

---

Colin, my friend, to be fair, the passage you describe is limited to one (albeit slightly long) sentence that seeks to emphasize that their time together was fleeting; a brief pause before Shepard would ship off again and that their honeymoon was the first time the couple had "spent more than a day or two together, and never had they been truly alone."

posted 04-13-2004 10:35 PM               

I just take exception to (page 56)"watch each other undress, to taste each other, to make love" and again on the next page (57) "a final night together, a final taste of each other." The guy seems to have a predeliction for odious repetition, which I personally find intrusive and unecessary. It's only a very small point, I know, but one that stuck in my craw when I thought of his children and grandchildren reading that.

Mostly the book suffers from not having a good space historian go through it for him before he rushed to print, as there are several errors that diminish its overall credibility. But as I said earlier, who am I to talk? People in glass houses and all that ...

posted 04-14-2004 01:24 PM               

Some authors have access to personal letters, living subjects, cooperative children, personal journals. Neal had none of these. He had his training in journalism, his imagination, his skill as a writer, but little in the way of private, personal material.

Rob makes an excellent point re: the FBI material, which I understand is vile. It takes a principled author to resist the temptation to draw on such material. So kudos to Thompson. Well done.
[I like this edit function on cS--not the same as a preview function, where one can also proof and rewrite, but helpful all the same.--KCS]