(#50 in the 2008 Book Challenge)

Good GRIEF, somebody please remind me about this the next time I think I will read a Tom Wolfe book. I seem to read one about every 15 years and in between I forget what an unpleasant experience I find it. I cannot! Take! The exclamation points! I'm one of those people who, constitutionally, cannot ignore an exclamation point on the printed page, so reading this was like being shouted at for great lengths of time. As everyone in the free world already knows, this is Tom Wolfe's book about the Mercury Space program, focusing on the personalities of the test pilots and the social significance of beating the Russians into space, or you know, failing to do that. I'm sure I've seen the movie countless times, mostly in parts on cable, but I had never read the book and that didn't seem right. I'm not even sure it seems right now, either, but I will say that for a book that I found almost painful to read, I have absolutely no doubt it informs just about every image we have of the space race and NASA in popular culture. So that part is impressive.

Grade: I don't even know.
Recommended: This is one of those books where I feel like I gained something in the end, but the process of getting there was almost unbearable.

The 1983 motion picture “Right Stuff” is one of my all-time favorites. The movie recounts with a lot of humor and insight, the personal stories of the first Astronauts and their wives during the epic of the American Mercury Space Program.
Wolfe is looking for the answer to the question: “What makes a man brave or crazy enough to be hurled into Space on top of a huge rocket?”
The answer: To have the “Right Stuff”, an out of this world, macho Coolness.
I saw the movie several times and even learned a lot of its splendid “one – liners” by heart at the time.
I knew that it was an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book but I never came to read it. I did however read the biography of Chuck Yeager, the test pilot who first crossed the sound barrier and who played a major role in the movie. It was an interesting read but not more than that either.

Only when “The Right Stuff” appeared as a novelty in the 2009 Folio Society’s catalogue did I finally acquire and read it.

The Right Stuff is the story of the pilots engaged in U.S. Mercury program.
In the first chapters, Wolfe introduces us to the personal stories of the test pilots. We are following their very risky lives as well as the psychological strain it brings to their wives.
Wolfe has extensively researched his subject by interviewing the pilots and their families and it shows in his descriptions what the “right stuff” of man and wife are made of. The introduction of these modern heroes culminates in Chuck Yeager’s successful attempt to break the sound-barrier.

We then switch to the selection process of the pilots for America’s first Space Program Mercury. Wolfe contrasts the selected “Mercury Seven” with the Edwards base test pilots, among which was Chuck Yeager.

Yeager and other top pilots seem to have been shut out of the astronaut program after it was decided to only select college-degreed pilots. We can suspect their disappointment even though astronauts are installed on top of the rockets for mere promotional reasons. The first crewmembers would not actually fly the spacecraft and the chimpanzee specimen preceded the human spacemen!

In the last part, we follow the first space successes. Shepard goes first for just a peep in space and comes down a hero with ticket tape parade, White House visit and all that. After that it is the turn of Grissom. The capsule is lost at sea when he exists prematurely. No hero welcome for him! Third up and first orbital flight is John Glenn and again we go trough the whole Hero – Media circus. The next astronauts are…, what is their name again? As the media attention is drawn to the Vietnam war and the next - even better- Apollo moon program, the heroes receive less and less attention.
Having the right stuff is no longer news.

The Right stuff is a pleasure to read. It is interesting, witty and intelligent and at some moments hilarious. A sure recommendation.

One of my favorite books. Wolfe's history of the early space program is a book not to be missed. You'll be hooked from the first page. Then follow it up with the movie which is almost as good! ( )

The Right Stuff is one of my all-time favorite movies, and after watching it dozens of times I finally read the book. As books tend to be, it was a lot more in-depth exploring the history of space flight from the test pilots attempting to break the sound barrier in the 1940's through the end of the Mercury program in the 1960's. Full of stories, facts, and connections this book is also written in an engaging style. A must of anyone interested in the space program or 20th-Century History. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed the first two books I read by Tom Wolfe, A Man In Full & Bonfire of the Vanities. I really enjoy the sweeping backgrounds that Wolfe unfolds his views of what is right and wrong in American life. I had this in mind going into reading this book, a book in which I’ve seen the movie adaptation for at least 25 times, if not more, and as I put the book down, finished, I felt maybe a trifle disappointed.

The mid fifties through the early sixties ushered in the golden era of the jet age and this is the background which the book is set against. Wolfe contrasts NASA’s Project Mercury against the Air Force’s X-1 project and how the first seven NASA astronauts are viewed through the eyes of the public and their counterpart pilots. How we, as Americans viewed these seven as our protectors against the Russian space program. A space program, that by putting the first satellite along with the first man and woman into orbit, sent shivers through the American population that we would be going to bed under a communist moon and there would be fleets of Russian cosmonauts hurling nuclear bombs onto American soil from miles above, out of reach.

I really enjoyed Wolfe’s detailed accounts of John Glenn’s and Scott Carpenter’s 3 orbits as well as Gordon Cooper’s 34 hours in space. I really felt like I was in the capsule hearing the noises of the cockpit and experiencing the forces applied to their bodies as they hurtled through space. One unexpected outcome is not feeling as scared of early space travel. Seriously, that is some way old technology that was throwing these astronauts up 130 miles above the ground at speed in-excess of 5k mph. But, I don’t see myself wanting to sign up for the next Space Shuttle flight.

One thing for sure, I don’t think I ever want to see the word ziggurat again! ( )