Reviews
Goddamn fantastic.
Really enjoyable. Captures the hysteria around the space race and the catapulting of our first astronauts into eternal fame and glory. RIP Tom Wolfe.
This is the origin story of the American Astronaut, how the role of the men in the manned space flight program evolved along with America's perception of them as champions in the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union.
There are a lot of books about the Space Race and the NASA of the late '50s and early '60s. None are quite like The Right Stuff. Wolfe earned his chops during that same time as a journalist, experimenting with what he called "New Journalism" — a way of inserting more literary prose into his newsy stories. (Truman Capote, Hunter Thompson, and others of the era did this too.) The style is utterly unique in non-fiction, using eccentric punctuation, a lot of dialogue (including inner dialogue), and trying to get deep into the heads and psyches of his subjects. In this particular book, those subjects were the Mercury 7 — the very first astronauts of America's budding space program. Before getting there, though, Wolfe looks at the test pilot mindset in general, using the incomparable Chuck Yeager as a case study. (The story of his breaking the sound barrier with a broken rib is, to my mind, one of the more memorable scenes in non-fiction literature.) These guys had an indefinable quality that combines ego, courage, nonchalance, risk-taking . . . the right stuff. And the entirety of the book is about defining that quality. This is no science book; there's very little mechanical information. It's entirely about the characters. The first three chapters blew me away. Like I said, I just have never encountered this type of writing in non-fiction. I was sucked in. Wolfe captured all my senses, describing the sights, sounds, smells, and even the nervous and kinetic energy of being a pilot and astronaut. He also tells the stories of the wives, who had to play along and smile for the cameras and pretend that their family life was perfect. (It was not, but 1960s America wanted it to be.) I have to imagine some of the material for that astronaut wives show from a couple years back was pulled from here. This book is a classic of non-fiction for a reason. It reads like fiction, and though I got a little tired of the style at times (excessive punctuation becomes less novel and more annoying as the pages keep turning), I was always drawn right back in with Wolfe's masterful descriptions of the astronauts' experiences. If you've not read The Right Stuff, do yourself a favor and get to it.
Although at times, it was a little over-written, this book offers a very thorough insider's view of the personalities, character, and lifestyle of the pilots who became our first astronauts as well as the politics, historical perspective, and culture that shaped the early space program. In an age where space travel has become passe, I found it interesting to go back to a time in which space travel was everything. In fact, it was equated with national survival in the face of the malevolently powerful Soviet empire. That is particularly interesting in light of the fact that today, Americans are bringing Russians home in our shuttles and they are taking Americans to space in theirs. I have a new respect for those early astronauts but unexpectedly also for military pilots in general. I knew it was dangerous, but never realized how dangerous a vocation it was (and likely still is) until I read this book.
