The Right Stuff

The What When Book List 1970 - 2020

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, 1979

Read in Sept. 1980

Today the folks with the right stuff are in our hospitals instead of space and certainly not anywhere near the white house.

The book here was an interesting account of the test pilots engaged in the post-war research into high speed rocket powered aircraft and the stories of the Mercury astronauts who came out of that earlier testing program based on extensive research by Wolfe. He recounts the enormous risks that the test pilots took and the intense mental and physical characteristics needed to get into the space program.

It was adapted into a very good movie of the same name in 1983.

He also wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968 but that is another story.