Endurance

The book starts at the end. In the prologue, after the year-long mission, the author is at dinner at home in Houston with family: long-term partner Amiko, daughters Samantha and Charlotte, and twin brother Mark. Getting up requires pushing off the table “like an old man reaching for his crutches”, and the twenty steps to the bedroom bring a stumble. The night is worse: fever, swollen legs, an itchy rash. An ankle squishes “like a water balloon”. This opening poses the book's central question: how much can the human body take in a year, and why is the experiment necessary?

The author admits to never finding a fully satisfying answer to “why did you volunteer?” and goes back to childhood. In a home where a police officer father and a secretary mother worked day and night, the twins climbed onto roofs, loved risk and hated school. In high school, working as an emergency medical technician showed for the first time that there was something the author was good at. At eighteen, after failing pre-med classes at college, the author sees Tom Wolfe's “The Right Stuff” in a bookshop window, reads it in one night and closes it “a different person”. These are some of the most moving pages: the author writes that this real starting point was kept private for years.

Chapter one opens in February 2015. With the space shuttles retired in 2011, Americans can reach space only on Russian Soyuz craft. The author describes Star City near Moscow — the giant statue of Gagarin, houses built for Americans that feel like “a film set based on Russian stereotypes about how Americans live” — and Baikonur in the Kazakh steppe: rusting scrap, dogs and camels foraging in the shadow of aerospace hardware, an international crew flown in on a former Soviet bomber.

The chapter's most enjoyable aspect is its cross-cultural observation. The author introduces commander Gennady Padalka as “a natural leader” and Misha Kornienko as calm and thoughtful. Russian rituals are described with irony but respect: dill on every dish, being beaten with birch branches in the banya, the compulsory pre-flight enema, the doctor nicknamed “Dr. No” for his arbitrary quarantine decisions, Sokol suits closed with ordinary rubber bands. The author notes that the Soyuz rocket descends from the R-7, the Cold War's first intercontinental ballistic missile — and that former enemies now fly to space together.

The scientific side is clear too: a normal mission lasts five or six months, and almost nothing is known about what happens to the body after that. On the previous 159-day mission the author lost bone density and muscle, had vision problems and absorbed radiation equal to about ten chest X-rays a day. Yet for the author the hardest risk is something else: something bad could happen to a loved one while you are in space, and there is no way home.

The style is simple, businesslike and funny; the shifts between the painful scenes of the prologue and the absurd details of Baikonur keep the book lively. Some political remarks and family relationships (divorce, a cool relationship with the elder daughter) are discussed openly, which gives the book human depth. The Turkish translation reads smoothly.

• An alternating structure of the year in space and the life story
• Humorous observations on Russian and American space cultures
• Open, unembarrassed descriptions of effects on body and mind