Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly was a challenging but very fascinating read! Mr. Kelly had a goal from a fairly early age and he spent the next thirty years of his life learning, training, and finally being what he had set out to be. He wanted to be an astronaut and his struggle with ADD and perpetual bad grades was not going to stop him. The amount of focus, intelligence and ability to learn many complex systems and subjects quickly and efficiently was truly inspiring. All of the things he had to learn from physics in college to all of the intricate and complicated pieces of equipment in the Air Force to fly jets and finally on the ISS was astounding. There was never any doubt that astronauts are some of the smartest and bravest people on the planet but the ratio of time spent training and the time actually spent in space doing what they trained to do was unbelievable. They spent years training for trips that took as little as a few days to as long as over a year to actually complete. That is a vast time and energy commitment for such a small trade off and often they would wait years just to be put on a mission. Scott Kelly's explanations of his many experiments, the many blood tests he administered himself, the lengthy spacewalks and the many other seemingly mundane tasks such as going to the bathroom were much harder in reality in space than on the ground. These hardships were what made this a great read! I would recommend this book to anyone!