Light This Candle: The Life and Times of Alan Shepard Book

As part of my ongoing quest to read all of the available biographies of the men and women who've made it into space, in chronological order of first launch, I finally made it to number 2!

You never really hear much about Alan Shepard any more, even though he was America's First Man In Space. And when you do, it's often from clips of his Apollo 14 moon landing when he hit a golfball on the moon's surface.

The biographer reveals that this is due in large part because Shepard, though by no means a quiet man or someone who hated the spotlight, did not care to share much about his personal life or feelings until his later age. So Light This Candle is the first full biography of his life, published a little more than a decade ago, and only a few years after the astronaut's death at the age of 74.

While I greatly enjoyed Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, both in movie and book form, it's obvious there were a number of artistic licenses taken with the real stories and exaggerations made to make the tales of America's first space heroes more dramatic and interesting. Light This Candle peels back some of that lens flare but still makes for a fun read.

The general impression I got about Admiral Shepard was that as a boy and young man Alan was quite unsure of himself, nowhere near the best at anything, until he discovered one day the concept of "fake it till you make it". After that point he frequently told himself and others that he was, in fact, the very best on Earth and somehow convinced everyone, especially himself, that that was the case. You definitely got the impression he could be a hot-headed jerk, but he damn well knew his stuff.

When reading stories from the early space program days I always love it when Henri Landwirth makes an appearance, and in this book it's more than just a cameo as he was in The Right Stuff. Holocaust survivor, owner of the Holiday Inn of Cocoa Beach during the early days of the space race, close friend of the astronauts, and founder of my favorite charity Give Kids the World where I frequently volunteer, Henri Landwirth is an awesome dude. It sounds like he and Alan Shepard were dear friends, and I got a little misty eyed reading about how Alan was one of the biggest initial supporters of GKTW.

In the last few pages of the book (SPOILERS FOR A BIOGRAPHY I SUPPOSE) the author details how friends of Shepard claimed going to the moon "changed him". He was no longer as much of a self-serving competitive hothead and wanted to do as much as he could to make the world a better place. Seeing a distant, fragile Earth unmarked by state or national lines made him realize we all gotta figure out how to get along somehow.

That seems to be a common theme of sorts when I read this stuff. Space makes people soft.

What an awesome dude. One day I'll get around to honoring him by playing Mass Effect, where they named the protagonist Commander Shepard after America's First Spaceman.