Particularly valuable are the accounts of the historic 1959 selection process (and selection medicine) at Lovelace Clinic and Wright-Patterson A.F.B. There are painstakingly technical accounts of the engineering and design work on the hardware in addition to first-person accounts of spaceflight itself, from the days when astronauts flew alone and then only briefly -- for a lifetime of fame.
First military tests pilots and then engineers, the Mercury astronauts were not professional writers. The editor does a brilliant job of preserving the distinctive voices of the individual astronauts, while showcasing the highly technical subjects the men describe in WE SEVEN, a bestseller when it was first published in 1962.« less