Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journey.

COLLINS, Michael; Foreword by Charles A. Lindbergh.

$2,000.00

Item Number: 128433

New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1974.

First edition of one of the finest memoirs of space travel. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated. Presentation copy, humorously inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For Coke and Betty, when overtaken by insomnia. Michael Collins.” Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by Robert T. McCall. Foreword by Charles A. Lindbergh. First printings are uncommon signed.

Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys was in 1974, and it is an autobiographical account by the Gemini 10 and Apollo 11 astronaut. Collins writes his own work and does not hire ghost writers, explaining that "[n]o matter how good the ghost, I am convinced that a book loses realism when an interpreter stands between the storyteller and his audience" (Collins, 2001). Indeed, Collins writing has been called "the best-written book yet by any of the astronauts" by Time magazine. The New York Times Book Review said, "No other person who has flown in space has captured the experience so vividly.”