It is easy to imagine this material making for a pretty conventional book in ordinary hands, a standard account of heroic explorers shooting for the stars. Gemini IV astronauts Ed White (left) and Jim McDivitt stand at Cape Kennedy's Launch Pad 19 on June 1, 1965. (Image credit: NASA)

Siskel, Gene (December 25, 1983). "Movie year 1983: Box office was better than the films". Chicago Tribune . Retrieved June 1, 2022. Another test pilot highlighted in the book is Scott Crossfield. Crossfield and Yeager were fierce but friendly rivals for speed and altitude records. Farmer, Jim. "Filming the Right Stuff." Air Classics, Part One: Vol. 19, No. 12, December 1983, Part Two: Vol. 20, No. 1, January 1984. Much of the work’s magic comes from the wondrous way in which Wolfe blended teaching and entertaining. He delved into the concept of the “righteous stuff,” perhaps understood to be cool bravery, which the author suggested separated the best pilots from everyone else. He studied the subculture among these men and the mass hysteria, driven by fears of Soviet Communist space supremacy, which surrounded these original seven astronauts. It’s as much an examination of American culture as a history book. But throughout, the pace never slows, the read never grows dull, and the text’s amusing wit and charm never fails. Another option considered was using athletes already accustomed to physical stress, such as circus trapeze artists. Wolfe states that President Dwight D. Eisenhower insisted on pilots, even though the first crew members would not actually fly the spacecraft. When Gus Grissom lands at sea and exits his space capsule, saving the capsule seems more important to the recovery team than saving the pilot because of the value of the data.The last part of the book slows down some again, but does have it's definite highlights, such as the "astronaut charm school" teaching such indispensable knowledge as what way your thumbs should be pointed, should you ever put your hands on your hips. (Which, as we all know, probably should be avoided altogether). Another great part is the failed Yeager attempt to set a new altitude record for the souped-up version of the F-104 fighter plane. Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff is different. This in one I’ll remember. It’s not my favorite book, not even close. John Blaha, a space shuttle astronaut of the 1980s, recalled a different facet of "The Right Stuff" after his STS-29 crew was invited to The White House in 1989 to meet then-President George H. W. Bush, during a presidential phone call to the space shuttle. Vernon Scott, article "Schirra debunks notions about astronauts," The Tribune newspaper, San Diego, CA, 9 May 1985, p. D-12. Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” is the story of those first American astronauts (‘star travelers’), seven men who had been selected from a large pool of military jet pilots to compete with the Soviets in the race to conquer space. Wolfe was interested in that race, but he was more interested in what would make men who would be “willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman candle … and wait for someone to light the fuse.”

A quite good read, but not really what I would expect from Wolfe. The tone is very informal and the narrative almost unstructured conversational. This makes the first third a bit slow and drawn out as we're repeatedly hammered by the problem with the start of the Mercury program being that the pilot-cum-astronauts would not be required, or even able to, use their flying skills. The race with Russia was full on from the start and the feats being accomplished under their program, with little forewarning or insights, is compared to the "Chief Designer" and the "Integral" of Zamyatin's "We". This is an apt parallel, but awfully tiresome when used 20-30 times... Absolutely first class . . . Improbable as some of Wolfe's tales seem, I know he's telling it like it was.” — The Washington Post Book WorldGoldman, William. Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade. New York: Vintage Books USA, 2001. ISBN 0-375-70319-5. His narrator is part anthropologist, part satirist, part historian, and nothing escapes his eye. Even if you've seen the terrific Philip Kaufman film, I highly recommend reading this ridiculously entertaining and informative book that tells you a lot about the space program, the Cold War, the rise of mass media, gender roles and even (near the end) the race issue. But the novelized feel with people becoming almost characters, the repetition, the breathlessness of narration, the disregard of objectivity in favor of speculation and assumption, the focus on dismantling the legend of heroes that shifts to what seems to be opinionatedly gleeful pointing out of all their fallibilities — all that put a barrier between me and actual enjoyment of this book.

Tom Wolfe, the author of The Right Stuff (1979), one of the most iconic literary books about spaceflight, died this week. Tom Wolfe spent his early days as a Washington Post beat reporter, where his free-association, onomatopoetic style would later become the trademark of New Journalism. In books such as The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe delves into the inner workings of the mind, writing about the unconscious decisions people make in their lives. His attention to eccentricities of human behavior and language and to questions of social status are considered unparalleled in the American literary canon.

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