Jeff Shesol’s Mercury Rising highlights this fragility in a refreshing narrative that captures the sometimes dispiriting realities of America’s debut in space.

In this dramatic account, Shesol (Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court) tells the story of the first manned American spaceflight into orbit. In the introduction, Shesol skillfully sets the scene, describing an anxious nation that watched as John Glenn prepared to launch aboard the spacecraft Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962.

Shesol chronicles the early days of the space program with a historian’s attention to detail and a novelist’s flair for interesting storytelling.

In Mercury Rising Jeff Shesol [...] provides a splendid account of Glenn's mission. Shesol sets America's space program in the context of the Cold War. Drawing on interviews and Glenn's personal notes, he includes a fascinating portrait of the astronaut who became a national icon..

Today, when everyone knows that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are financing private space missions, but few can name any of the more than 200 astronauts who have lived on the International Space Station, it can be hard to explain the excitement and awe that 1962 mission aroused in Americans of all stripes, as well as people the world over. It seems like a story from a simpler and altogether less-jaded time — a time Jeff Shesol captures in Mercury Rising, which brings Glenn’s story alive again with both nostalgia and a riveting, fast-paced narrative that has 'movie' written all over it.

[E]ntertaining and deeply researched.

A gripping, exhaustively detailed chronicle of America’s initial sprint in the space race seen through the eyes of the first American to orbit the Earth.