Dragonfly: Nasa and the Crisis Aboard Mir

In the warm, Wolfean afterglow of John Glenn's latest journey through space, the spectre of the Mir space station and its panoply of disasters seemed a distant nightmare — until this meticulous account of the ill-fated three-year Russian-American partnership there. Journalist Bryan Burrough (Barbarians at the Gate) provides a close look at the ground-level jockeying and verbal jousting of striving astronauts, chest-puffing NASA bureaucrats, and the tradition-rooted Russians. The choking, isolated intensity of the mission itself (especially the minute-by-minute account of a 1997 station-craft collision) is at once thrilling and terrifying, leavened by dryly startling details, like the smuggled-on vodka-filled ''drink bags.'' More Apollo 13 than The Right Stuff in its demeanor, Dragonfly: Nasa and the Crisis Aboard Mir is a fitting testament to those who endured, rather than enjoyed, their time on Mir. A-