The Astronaut Training Book for Kids

School Library Journal

Gr 5 Up-- After brief sections on the history of space travel and optimistic predictions of jobs that will be available in space in the future, Long offers wide-ranging suggestions for preparing for a career in space. These include everything from school work and physical fitness to joining national space and computer clubs, visiting specialized museums, and attending space camps, all with addresses and descriptions. Each section is followed by an undifferentiated host of books for further reading that jumble together easy and adult titles. Long's grasp of science is somewhat insecure, and he appears not to have heard that budgets for future programs are complex numbers: they have real and imaginary parts, and the farther into the future one peers, the more completely imaginary they become. Nor does he differentiate between an invention that has been worked out on paper, or even on small scale on Earth, and one that has been built and tested in space. Still this book has great value because of the information on what young people can do now, as opposed to after graduation from high school or college, making its appeal much more immediate than Schefter's Aerospace Careers (Watts, 1987). --Margaret Chatham, formerly at Smithtown Library, NY