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The Right Stuff Paperback – October 30, 2001

4.6 out of 5 stars 5,323

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When the future began...

The men had it. Yeager. Conrad. Grissom. Glenn. Heroes ... the first Americans in space ... battling the Russians for control of the heavens ... putting their lives on the line.

The women had it. While Mr. Wonderful was aloft, it tore your heart out that the Hero's Wife, down on the ground, had to perform with the whole world watching ... the TV Press Conference: "What's in your heart? Do you feel with him while he's in orbit?"

The Right Stuff. It's the quality beyond bravery, beyond courage. It's men like Chuck Yeager, the greatest test pilot of all and the fastest man on earth. Pete Conrad, who almost laughed himself out of the running. Gus Grissom, who almost lost it when his capsule sank. John Glenn, the only space traveler whose apple-pie image wasn't a lie.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“An exhilarating flight into fear, love, beauty and fiery death ... magnificent.”
People

“It is Tom Wolfe at his very best ... technically accurate, learned, cheeky, risky, touching, tough, compassionate, nostalgic, worshipful, jingoistic —
The Right Stuff is superb.”
The New York Times Book Review

“Breathtaking ... epic ... There are images and ideas in
The Right Stuff that glisten like a rocket screaming to the heavens.”
Los Angeles Times

“Romantic and thrilling ... One of the most romantic and thrilling books ever written about men who put themselves in peril.”
The Boston Globe

“It’s magic ... the best book I have read in the last ten years.”
Chicago Tribune


Also by Tom Wolfe:

The Bonfire of the Vanities
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
From Bauhaus to Our House
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
The Painted Word
The Right Stuff
Mauve Gloves & Madmen
Clutter & Vine
In Our Time
The Pumphouse Gang
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

Available wherever Bantam Books are sold

From the Inside Flap

When the future began...

The men had it. Yeager. Conrad. Grissom. Glenn. Heroes ... the first Americans in space ... battling the Russians for control of the heavens ... putting their lives on the line.

The women had it. While Mr. Wonderful was aloft, it tore your heart out that the Hero's Wife, down on the ground, had to perform with the whole world watching ... the TV Press Conference: "What's in your heart? Do you feel with him while he's in orbit?"

The Right Stuff. It's the quality beyond bravery, beyond courage. It's men like Chuck Yeager, the greatest test pilot of all and the fastest man on earth. Pete Conrad, who almost laughed himself out of the running. Gus Grissom, who almost lost it when his capsule sank. John Glenn, the only space traveler whose apple-pie image wasn't a lie.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bantam (October 30, 2001)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0553381350
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0553381351
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.53 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.03 x 0.99 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 out of 5 stars 5,323

About the author

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Tom Wolfe
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Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York magazine, and is credited with coining the term, “The Me Decade.”

Among his many honors, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University, graduating cum laude, and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He lived in New York City.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
5,323 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2021
Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book, “The Right Stuff,” chronicles the diverging research of high-altitude rocket planes and spaceflight from the early 1950s through Project Mercury, contrasting the Mercury Seven astronauts with test pilots at Edwards AFB and Naval Air Station Patuxent River, with Chuck Yeager standing out as exemplifying the “right stuff” even though he was not chosen for the space program. Wolfe writes in a somewhat conversational style, working to capture the mentality of test pilots of that era and how it defined what it meant to be a pilot for generations to come, much as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and others did for pilots of the early twentieth century. Wolfe further evokes the heady emotion of the days of Mercury, when the immediacy of the Cold War turned the Space Race into a battlefront of sorts and the astronauts into Single Combat Warriors to whom the public paid homage. However, Wolfe points out that the test pilots at Edwards were skeptical of the space program, particularly as those running it initially conceived of the pilot as little more than a passenger in a capsule. Meanwhile, the test pilots in the high desert were flying rocket planes to altitudes that required the same skills as a spacecraft, such as control of attitude jets since the air was too thin – or nonexistent – for the plane’s control surfaces to work as the plane had crossed the boundary into space. Despite these achievements, the astronauts captured the public’s imagination and eventually succeeded in using their public positions to regain some of their status as pilots, though the heady days of Mercury did not last into the Gemini and Apollo programs, where spaceflight became more routine as astronauts were longer regaled as Single Combat Warriors.

The style and success of Wolfe’s book ensured its adaptation and Hollywood has done so twice, first in Philip Kaufman’s 1983 film and again in the 2020 television series from National Geographic. This Vintage Classics copy is a nice paperback edition with a great pop-art cover and an introduction from Astronaut Scott Kelly that helps to capture of the legacy of “The Right Stuff.” Something appears to have gone wrong during the formatting process, however, as there are several typographical errors throughout the book (extraneous letters jumbled in the middle of words, words divided by a hyphen as if they were meant to be split between two lines, and multiple instances of the number 1 in place of an “l” or an “I”). These occur often enough to be noticeable, but thankfully Wolfe’s narrative is engrossing and makes up for it.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2011
This is a people-oriented look at America's entry into space. It begins with test pilots in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, especially with the guy who broke the sound barrier, Chuck Yeager. Then, after America's space program gets a jolt from the USSR's launching of the Sputnik, the story proceeds through Project Mercury to the last Mercury mission in 1963.

Be advised, Tom Wolfe does not give us a comprehensive account of Project Mercury. The astronauts, their wives, NASA people, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, and a few other characters play roles in the story, and sometimes--particularly regarding the astronauts and their wives--the focus on them is close. But a great amount of material regarding the Mercury missions is omitted or is given only cursory examination. Obviously there is more to the history of America's early space program than the people. Even so, I doubt if the formal history, THIS NEW OCEAN: A HISTORY OF PROJECT MERCURY, includes the information about people that Wolfe includes. I may change my mind after reading THIS NEW OCEAN, but for now I think both books are necessary for a complete picture.

Also be advised, THE RIGHT STUFF is not written in the conventional style of historical narration. Wolfe's style is light and often witty. He uses jargon, colorful figures of speech, and hyperbole. With amazon's "Look Inside" feature, I read the first pages of THIS NEW OCEAN. Its prose is conventional nonfiction, like something found on the front page of a newspaper. Wolfe's prose is like something found in editorial pages or in a breezy novel.

There are no footnotes and no index. In his "Author's Note" at the end, Wolfe provides a brief bibliography.

Many of Wolfe's paragraphs are too long, but this is the only thing I condemn unequivocally as a flaw. For history I do prefer straightforward factual narration, not flippancy, and if I were writing this only to myself, I would consider that flippancy a flaw. Nevertheless, the acclaim this book has received indicates that most other readers are not bothered by Wolfe's style. So you will probably not consider it a flaw.

Though some of Wolfe's details are inaccurate, details are soon forgotten anyway, and for this book I think they are not worth harping about. I give him five stars because of his revealing portrayals of characters. They are accurate enough, I think, and they will be remembered.

P.S. July 30, 2012:
I tried reading THIS NEW OCEAN: A HISTORY OF THE MERCURY PROJECT, which is NASA's official history of the Mercury Project. It was tedious, made more so by its lack of a list of abbreviations and an index. Though John Catchpole's PROJECT MERCURY was written with the same matter-of-fact, term-paper prose, it had a list of abbreviations and an index and was more readable. Though I had to work to get it and though I had to pay a steep price for his book, Catchpole at least gave me the information that Tom Wolfe left out.
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Top reviews from other countries

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OC
5.0 out of 5 stars The right story
Reviewed in Brazil on October 27, 2021
Essa é a versão original, excelente. Fuja de releituras sensacionalistas, como a disponivel em um certo serviço de streaming (não é o Prime) que despreza os fatos em prol de uma estória mais apelativa. O filme dos anos 80 é bem mais próximo ao livro e também vale a pena.
Mario Mora Lara
4.0 out of 5 stars la aventura de conquistar el espacio
Reviewed in Mexico on July 11, 2021
una lectura necesaria para descubrir los aportes de la carrera espacial
Shammo
5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome !
Reviewed in India on May 12, 2022
Very lively storytelling
Mike
5.0 out of 5 stars Wife doesn’t care about space but likes to read. I bought for her. She likes space now
Reviewed in Canada on May 30, 2020
I bought this for my wife who is not a space person at all... despite me bringing her to some of the best air and space museums in the world. But after she read this book it really opened her eyes.
One person found this helpful
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Michael Powell
5.0 out of 5 stars Tom Wolfe was a literary genius.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 13, 2021
I absolutely love this book. As an aviation and space flight nut, this is the best book ever written about early manned spaceflight. Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff is brilliantly written. His insights on Yeager and the Mercury 7 is astonishingly well documented. This author knows how to write.
I highly recommend this book, way better than the film.
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