Snow! We’ve postponed to next Saturday, Feb 22. Same Book Club time, same Book Club place.

For February, we are reading awesome  Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s “An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything”, latest contender in the ongoing Longest Title contest.

Chris Hadfield is a veteran of 3 space flights, the first Canadian to walk in space, two weeks living under the ocean in a deep-sea habitat and is the author of 2 books and the creator of a slew of space–related videos.

In his latest book, Hadfield tells the story of his third space flight, his 5-month stay aboard the International Space Station last year, and the events leading up to and following that flight. It is organized into 3 sections, training and preparation, the space flight itself, and his return to Earth. In keeping with the realities of space flight, the first section, about preparation and training, is by far the longest. That in fact is one of Hadfield’s major points: that thorough preparation and planning makes any difficult part of a person’s life far more manageable and with much greater chance of success, even when everything goes wrong and all one’s plans need to be promptly abandoned.

The title of the book makes it sound like a self-help book, and indeed in some sense it is. Each chapter is loosely organized around a principle that Hadfield found useful, many of them contrary to conventional self-help advice, such as “Sweat the Small Stuff” and “The Power of Negative Thinking”. But unlike most self-help books, Hadfield makes no promises and seldom even gives advice (except maybe Plait’s Law, “Don’t be a Jerk”.) He just relates these ideas as things that helped him in the highly competitive, high-stress world of becoming and being an astronaut. All this is presented in a very low-key manner, and the book can easily be read as a series of anecdotes, mostly on the human side of spaceflight.

I am almost finished reading the book (sorry this post is so late!), and found it quite enjoyable and a fairly quick read. If you haven’t started it yet, I think you still have time to read it before Saturday!

By the way, if you get the Kindle edition and are disappointed by the pictures, much better images are available on the Internet.

Join us to discuss this book on Saturday, February 15 22 at 3 PM in our usual meeting place, Harvard’s Northwest Science Building, 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge. Our meeting place can also be found near the exact center of

this image. Bring your appetite and, if you wish, a snack to share. Also optional, you can RSVP on our Facebook event page. Remember, the first gratuitous Star Trek reference always receives a complimentary, non-violent, phaser blast.

Mary will be leading an online discussion of the book the next day (February 23) at the Skepchick Book Club. Drop by and make all those insightful comments you forgot to make at the meeting, or if you live to far away to attend in person. (But it’s much more fun to be there!)