Countdown.

• Author: Gibney, Alex

Countdown. Frank Borman. Morrow, $19.95. What goes up must come down. That's a brief Newtonian synopsis of Countdown, an autobiography of Frank Borman, the man who guided the Apollo 8 mission around the moon, and then, as the CEO of Eastern Airlines, steered the troubled carrier into a crash landing-when a collision course with Eastern's unions forced the sale of the company to the airline raider, Frank Lorenzo.

The up side of the story is the stuff of which American myths are made. The only son of a gas-station operator becomes a pilot so skilled that he is tapped to lead the first spaceship around the moon. But Countdown tells of Borman's fall with much less honesty than his rise, and it contains an unintended moral: outer space may not be the best place to learn how to run a company.

The book is the latest in a series of joint-venture autobiographies. Like most of his kind, Mr. Borman's coauthor, Robert Serling, is paid to make his subject look good. In so doing, he renders the odyssey from gas pump to lunar orbit to Eastern shuttle with folksy similes and the glib PR patter that makes everything sound like a press release. (Mr. Serling, whose brother Rod created TV's "Twilight Zone," had already written the official history of Eastern Airlines, The Captain and the Colonel, which, like Countdown, too often dresses up the truth until it's close to fiction.)

Plenty of the real Borman comes through, however. He's a feisty character who goes after his enemies like Jake LaMotta. Give Borman credit for this: He jabs at just about everybody-from Carl Sagan and Chuck Yeager to Michael Dukakis and the Columbia students who pelted him with marshmallows during a speaking tour. With the exception of his wife Susan, Richard Nixon, and a few others, Colonel Borman fingers enough "nerds," "phonies," and "dumb bastards" to fill a convention hall. On the other hand, judging from his long and loving descriptions of airplanes, from T-33s to A-300s and 757s, Bon-nan never met a machine he didn't like. (Indeed, he liked them so much that he went on a plane-buy ing spree at Eastern that, some say, permanently saddled the company with debt it could not afford.)

The NASA years are chronicled in great detail, and space junkies will find much in those sections to interest them. For myself, I am perversely drawn to the saga of Eastern Airlines. Ridiculed for years by discontented passengers, and still the battleground for one of the most bitter and destructive...