Agent Palmer

Donald K. “Deke” Slayton may not be the household name he should be, but he has had a hand in shaping history as we have come to know it. He was one of the original Mercury Seven, unfortunately, he was the one who didn’t get a flight, but he did eventually make it into space, and in the meantime, he ran the Astronaut Office, and the story for how he got there, his impressions, his knowledge, perspective, and his stories, are second to none.

All of this is what makes Deke! worth your time.

I’ll admit it. I only know Lee Mack from YouTube. At first, he was a guest on some panel shows I was watching before I went into a deeper dive of panel shows and enjoyed him on Would I Lie To You?

That show plus all the guest appearances is one of the reasons I picked up David Mitchell’s Back Story: A Memoir, and it was also enough of a reason to pick up the other team leader’s autobiography; Mack the Life by Lee Mack.

Amy Shira Teitel’s Fighting for Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight features two characters who, while separated by 25 years in age, both lead the way for Sally Ride, but it wasn’t a smooth flight.

It’s compelling in the most dramatic of ways, and not just because the space program NASA had at the start consisted of “a bunch of rockets with a tendency to explode.” And despite a rallying cry of wanting the first woman in space to be American, it was Valentina Tereshkova from the Soviet Union who got there first.