memoirs of the Mercury Seven astronauts

Scott Carpenter (Mercury MA-7), For Spacious Skies: The Uncommon Journey of a Mercury Astronaut, with Kris Stoever (Harcourt, 2002)
Carpenter's name is on the title page, and the co-author is his daughter, but this book doesn't read like a memoir. The only part written in the first person is a clotted account of his spaceflight. Otherwise, Carpenter's own perspective is downplayed; there's relatively little declarative material on what he thought and felt, and much of the book presents other views. Thus, the lengthy and awkwardly written section on his childhood is chiefly about his parents, who were separated (which complicated things); the son is present mostly in the form of transcribed letters. Only when he joins the Navy and begins to fly planes does the narrative snap into place, but even then there's as much separable material about what his wife was doing (including the details of her visit with Jackie Kennedy after Scott's spaceflight, gosh wow), and on NASA (setting up the design process for Mercury, and organizing the selection of astronauts) as there is on Carpenter. The section on his flight is obsessed with rebutting Chris Kraft, the flight director, whom the authors unsurprisingly consider unfair in his denigration of Carpenter. (A footnote on p. 348 tells us that Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff is more accurate on Mercury than any of the astronaut or flight director memoirs.) This book attributes the problems with Carpenter's flight to resentment over his being chosen to replace the grounded Deke Slayton, Kraft's lack of sympathy with the science-oriented mission plan, and an undetected mechanical malfunction in the spacecraft which wasted fuel. The book also says that Carpenter's subsequent turn to sea diving (usually seen as an imposed exile) was entirely voluntary, driven at first by a desire to use it as training simulation for weightlessness. At that point, however, the narrative abruptly trails off.

Gordon Cooper (Mercury MA-9, Gemini 5), Leap of Faith: An Astronaut's Journey into the Unknown, with Bruce Henderson (HarperCollins, 2000)
Brisk, matter-of-fact memoir of Cooper's career, focusing on clear and succinct narratives of his two spaceflights, with his pre-NASA life tucked into a flashback chapter mostly about his childhood. Like many astronauts, Cooper considers himself a born pilot. Cooper has no interest in dishing dirt at NASA, but gives unornamented accounts of his own foibles (buzzing a NASA administrator in his jet, which came close to getting him kicked off Mercury) and frustrations, especially being kept off an Apollo flight, although he tells some unverified stories in the process. He's convinced there was a deliberate conspiracy as to who would get which mission (which the supposed culprits would say was unpredictable, due to not knowing at the time of assignments how much the previous flights would achieve), which serves as a thematic introduction to the part of the book on his post-NASA career. This conspicuously omits a lot of business failures, but what's left in is even weirder: Cooper advocates the notions that UFOs are alien spacecraft and that the government is hiding this, and he goes into business with a woman who claims to be receiving mental communications from a higher alien civilization. None of their new technologies based on these messages seem to give fruit, but Cooper remains, as his title suggests, faithful.

John Glenn (Mercury MA-6, STS-95), John Glenn: A Memoir, with Nick Taylor (Bantam, 1999)
A very full autobiography up through Glenn's Mercury flight, it then skims an overview through his business and Senate years with no focus on space (he shrugs off disasters and hardly mentions the Moon landing), until it's time for his geriatric shuttle flight, which resumes a description with the same detailed gusto as his Mercury days and his nearly 20 years as a Marine pilot - in which he had told of every base he was assigned to (and every house move his long-suffering wife had to pack for), every type of plane he flew, and everything he did in it. Gets liveliest for his time as a test pilot in armaments: he'd take a combat plane out over the Atlantic and fire its guns continuously to see if the vibrations made the plane fall apart, which sometimes it did. Otherwise most illuminating for its picture of Glenn's "gosh-wow" patriotism. Glenn's verdict on The Right Stuff is that the "book was good, but what Hollywood did to it could have been titled Laurel and Hardy Go to Space," but it's not that much of a parody: Glenn really is like that. He traces it to his small-town upbringing and admits that, when asked about his beliefs, "vintage New Concord, Ohio, came pouring out." It's most glaring when he finds glowing patriotic virtue in killing the enemy in war, and he proudly includes a letter to his 5-year-old daughter explaining why he was off fighting in Korea: basically to keep the Commies out from under her bed (p. 129-30).

Virgil "Gus" Grissom (Mercury MR-4, Gemini 3), Gemini: A Personal Account of Man's Venture into Space (Macmillan, 1968)
This book was completed just before Grissom's death in the tragic Apollo 1 pad fire in 1967, a month prior to what would have been his third spaceflight. Intended for older children, it's a succinct account of Project Gemini, half on general features (equipment, training, etc.) and half recounting the achievements of the individual missions. Giving Grissom's not-entirely whitewashed personal perspective on the importance and significance of the work, and a few joshing anecdotes, it functions as his work-oriented memoir of that period, especially as the general chapter on crews is devoted mostly to his own personal background as a sample astronaut. An editor who contributes an epilogue states that he "work[ed] closely with" Grissom on the book and implies that he polished the text, but does not claim to be a ghostwriter, though one wonders, as Grissom is elsewhere depicted as notoriously inarticulate.
Further perspective with more detail comes from his widow's memoir: Betty Grissom, Starfall, with Henry Still (Crowell, 1974). Written mostly in the third person, it's largely occupied with Gus's career, in more detail than his own book gives, with occasional first-person interjections from Betty showing her uncomplainingly watching the home front and raising their children while Gus is always off at work. She's sustained only by the occasional phone call. Gus was grateful that Betty was more accepting of this stressful existence than other astronaut wives, and she depicts herself as meekly acquiescent to his wishes about major life decisions. (In his book, he describes these as joint decisions.) After his death, however, she is bitter at being brushed aside by NASA and the space community, so she files a suit (eventually settled out of court), not against NASA, but against the contractor who built the faulty spacecraft, basically on grounds of Gus's pain and suffering. This right-angled turn in topic occupies the last few chapters. This book was a major acknowledged source for Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, and obviously so.
I know of one other book by an astronaut's widow: Nancy Conrad, Rocketman, with Howard A. Klausner (New American Library, 2005), a third-person biography of Pete Conrad (Gemini 5, Gemini 11, Apollo 12, Skylab) co-authored by his second wife, who entered his life long after his NASA days. (He wrote no memoir of his own.) It's emotively written, with lots of short paragraphs, somewhat confusingly framing his earlier life with tidbits selected from his last years.

Walter M. Schirra, Jr. (Mercury MA-8, Gemini 6, Apollo 7), Schirra's Space, with Richard N. Billings (Quinlan Press, 1988)
Very much a military man's memoir, especially in what feels like a larger section than it is, devoted to detailed description of Schirra's naval flying career, with particular emphasis (as with John Glenn) on his combat flying in Korea. When Schirra becomes an astronaut, the techy talk eases up a bit, but he still presents himself as a no-nonsense guy. Schirra was famous at NASA for his "gotcha" practical jokes, and he tells of many of these (including ones pulled on him), but he does so without a humorous tone, and he makes clear these were only for downtime, and that the job was a time to work. Other accounts suggests that Schirra was not nearly so work-focused, but they do agree with his unapologetic self-description as hard-nosed about getting Apollo 7 in shape after the pad fire. This is exactly the portrait of Schirra in the Apollo 7 episode of From the Earth to the Moon, which also borrows some verbal tics from this book: Schirra's habit of under-describing potential disasters as "ruining your whole day" or similar words (a locution also used by others, but not so frequently), and his repeated insistence that if someone does die, you mourn but you don't wear the black armband forever. Despite his tough attitude, Schirra has no criticisms to make of any of his crewmates. A post-NASA chapter shows him feeling flattered by wandering around in the business world over his head.

Alan Shepard (Mercury MR-3, Apollo 14) and Deke Slayton (ASTP), Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Apollo Moon Landings, with Jay Barbree, revised edition (Open Road Integrated Media, 2011; originally published 1994)
Not a memoir at all: despite the authorship credit line, this is a journalistic account, almost novelistic in its reconstructed (and probably sometimes invented) dialogue, of the US space program (with some coverage of the Soviet) from the Redstone rocket through the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission, acknowledged in the ancillary matter as the work of Barbree (with Howard Benedict, also listed as co-author in the first edition, but deceased before the second one appeared). Shepard and Slayton's supposed authorship only manifests itself in a few more quotes from them than others, and in a concentration on their personal vicissitudes, which sometimes overtakes other matters: thus Apollos 15 through 17 are virtually ignored in favor of the medical details of Slayton's return to flight status at the same time, but Apollo 14 gets three full chapters, because it was Shepard's flight. But this intense concentration on the details of some things while brushing aside others is characteristic of the entire book, whether Shepard or Slayton are involved or not. These abbreviations, plus an overwrought weepy writing style and a pair of rose-colored glasses over the whole program, render this book far less useful than other general histories of the topic. Nor is it as personally insightful or as full in coverage as Slayton's own memoir, or the biography of Shepard, Light This Candle by Neal Thompson (Crown, 2004). Concludes with a denunciation of US administrations which don't continue to fund NASA at moon-program levels.

Donald K. "Deke" Slayton (ASTP), Deke! U.S. Manned Space: From Mercury to the Shuttle, with Michael Cassutt (Forge, 1994)
Slayton was the one of the original Mercury astronauts who was grounded for a minor medical issue and never flew in space until cleared for the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission well over a decade later. In the meantime he served as chief of the astronaut office and selected the crews for all the flights. The memoir covers his full life, but most of it consists of succinct summaries of Gemini and Apollo missions (and Soviet manned missions) interspersed with the reasons behind his decisions for crew selection, something considered a deep secret at the time. Personalities do play a part, though there's not much revelatory in it. Slayton's tone is gruff, clipped about problems both in and out of flight, and it feels terse, although this is actually a very talkative book. He's extremely accepting of the risks of flight. He tells some interesting things not dealt with in other books, like how he got the nickname Deke (to distinguish him from another Don in the same fighter squadron, his fellows started calling him by his initials D.K., which evolved into Deke) and why Gordon Cooper never got an Apollo flight (Slayton claims not to be bothered by Cooper's carefree attitude, but it irritated management to whom Slayton was answerable). He places blame for the stamps incident squarely on Dave Scott. Like John Glenn, he liked the Right Stuff book, hated the movie. Occasionally the book offers a brief insert from "other voices," usually the perspective of a colleague or sometimes Slayton's son. (His first wife, with whom he shared his NASA years, and whom consequently it would have been especially good to hear from, had died before this book was written.)