- An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth - Chris Hadfield
This was brilliant! I would recommend this to everyone and I'm actually a bit sad that I read it at the end of the year, so it will just get lost on this little thread before we jump on to the 2016 one.
I didn't expect much more from it than some space anecdotes, but this book turned out to have very valuable insights about life in general, being prepared for anything, "working the problem", family, determination, and pushing down one's ego to help others shine.
It is also sort of an autobiography, in the same vein as Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, where he tells the reader about his life and himself as a person through various facets of his passion for running.
Hadfield is Canadian and wanted to be an astronaut since he was a child. But astronauts were just Americans at the time. Instead of giving up on his (then impossible) dream, he decided to be as prepared as he possibly could be in case one day it became possible for Canadians to go to space. So he went to university to be an engineer and then trained to be a fighter jet pilot. Then when it looked like the Shuttle was going to be decommissioned, he went to Russia to be NASA Director of Operations in Star City, learned to speak fluent Russian, and became fully qualified to pilot the Soyuz (which took the place of the Shuttle and now ferries astronauts & cosmonauts between Earth and ISS).
Single-minded, determined, and obviously very successful, but also incredibly modest, Hadfield shares his experience from training and succeeding among (and with) the top 0.1% of the most intelligent and highly trained people on Earth (and above it). I don't do books where author gives life lessons to readers, but this one actually taught me. A lot.
If anyone is interested, 