Wednesday, February 11, 2015

"You Are Here - Around the World in 92 Minutes" by Chris Hadfield

Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut and icon. During his last space mission on the International Space Station from December 2012 to May 2013, he inspired generations of children and adults as he tweeted from space, sang and played guitar in space and had  classroom conferences with school children in live time from space.  He lit a fire for science and exploration that I'm sure we'll still see the results of as this generation of children grow and turn into adults and choose their careers.  As he orbited the earth every 92 minutes and as the earth also was rotating he took about 45,000 photographs.  These are his favourites.  Grouped into countries, it's a visual wonder looking at his photographs and reading his short descriptions.  It's a view of our planet and landmarks from a whole other perspective.  Not wanting the photos to just look like a satellite image, he took them with an human element and point of view in mind.  They are amazing.  How different parts of a map look like a whole other 3D thing as it's seen whizzing by, the differences in continents and actual recognition of divisions of countries, the beauty of cities and the incredible actions of nature are described by Hadfield in sometimes a very witty way.  Totally enjoyed this book.  A treat visually and descriptively.

Reading Challenge Goals Met:  a book you can read in one day, non-fiction, new to me author

Will also be linked to Semicolon Saturday Review of Books



3 comments:

Tori Leslie said...

What an interesting book! I can't imagine his perspective on our world, not after seeing the things he has.
I'm sitting on an Amazon card, so who knows, I may get this. Thanks Susanne!

Barbara H. said...

I will definitely have to check this out. I enjoyed a number of his videos from space.

Dianna said...

Thanks so much for sharing about this Susanne. I am going to check it out!