The Right Stuff
Test pilots and the first astronauts, and the unnamed quality they were all measured against.
Tom Wolfe traces the line from Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier over the desert to the seven Mercury astronauts being turned into national symbols, and coins a name for the quality the pilots would never define out loud. He is funny about the press, the wives and the politics, and serious about the risk. It effectively invented the way Americans talk about the space programme.
Recommended by 1 Person
Laurence Leamer
Wolfe was a conservative in a liberal intellectual age, and he often stood alone. But nobody wrote about his era better than he did.
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