Off the Planet

It was like nothing on Earth. 'An unvarnished account of his near-disastrous stay, in 1997, on Russia's creaky space station...an engrossing report that NASA's publicity machine will bemoan' - Booklist . '[Linenger's] frank, personable prose shows readers what it's like to be an astronaut - or at least to be this particular astronaut, trying, along with his Russian companions, to live and work with good humor on an 11-year-old, half-broken, famously flammable space station as its air fills with antifreeze that is leaking out of shoddy cooling lines; - Publishers Weekly . 'NASA astronaut Linenger spent five months aboard the Russian space station Mir, a spacecraft operating far beyond its design life. His personal account vividly captures the challenges and privation he endured both before and during his flight' - Library Journal .