Proud! Thrilled! Happy!

O n one level, Lily Koppel’s new book is a breezy, entertaining account of the experiences of the wives of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts of the 1960s. The public persona of these women was always “proud,” “thrilled,” and “happy”—their watchwords. Their private well-being, however, was always something less. Read at this level, The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story is a restatement of the lives of many wives of the 1960s whose husbands were in the public eye. They spent their time caring for their families, each other, and supporting the efforts of NASA in reaching for theMoon. Lily Koppel is to be commended for persuading many of the astronauts’ wives, widows, and exes to speak at length with her. This book is largely the result of interviews with a sizable number of thosewomen. Although the book seeks to introduce readers to the lives of these women and raise awareness about their contributions to the space program, the one-dimensional focus on gossip, fashion, and family ends up too often leaving these women in the kitchen, even if Koppel does show Rene Carpenter and Annie Glenn as more political, liberated, public figures. Koppel describes how thewives of the astronauts formed their own little clique in Houston in the early 1960s. Originally, it was just the wives of the firstMercury Seven astronauts, led by “Mother”Marge Slayton,wife ofDeke, who commanded the group with an authority that even her husband must have envied. The author does not make this point explicitly—perhaps she is R E V I E W