The Right Stuff
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.94 (824 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0312427565 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 352 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-06-07 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
In his foreword, he notes that as late as 1970, almost one in four career Navy pilots died in accidents. Yet it was exactly the anachronistic courage of his subjects that captivated Wolfe. Yet soon the focus shifts to the seven initial astronauts. Chuck Yeager was certainly among the fastest, and his determination to push through Mach 1--a feat that some had predicted would cause the destruction of any aircraft--makes him the book's guiding spirit. Wolfe traces Alan Shepard's suborbital flight and Gus Grissom's embarrassing panic on the high seas (making the controversial claim that Grissom flooded his Liberty capsule by blowing the escape hatch too soon). Tom Wolfe began The Right Stuff at a time when it was unfashionable to contemplate American heroism. After an opening chapter on the terror of being a test pilot's wife, the story
"Tom Wolfe at his very best" (The New York Times Book Review)Millions of words have poured forth about man's trip to the moon, but until now few people have had a sense of the most engrossing side of the adventure; namely, what went on in the minds of the astronauts themselves - in space, on the moon, and even during certain odysseys on earth. It is this, the inner life of the astronauts, that Tom Wolfe describes with his almost uncanny empathetic powers, that made The Right Stuff a classic.. From "America's nerviest journalist" (Newsweek)--a breath-taking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the true heroism and courage of the first Americans to conquer space
Great book, KINDLE version FULL OF ERRORS Great book, completely flubbed by Amazon. Is it so hard to run a spell check on a Kindle manuscript before publishing it? This book is filled with ridiculous OCR screwups: letters cl being turned into a nonsensical d, for instance. And there are a lot of them. Amazon needs to fix this book and send us all an updated version that doesn't hurt our eyes or our brains.. Still an entertaining story about the early US space flight program more than 30 years after it was first published Flying Photographer At the time of publishing, besides the official NASA press releases there was very little information available to the public about the early US astronaut program, and as such this book represented an interesting look behind the scenes of a very public and at the same time rather secretive part of modern US history. These early astronauts basically overnight changed from being a anonymous pilots to lived their lives in the public eye.The very entertaining way in which Tom Wolfe presents his view on their lives and the program stands . A very cool 'story' The author did an excellent job of telling each space event as it effected all the concerned parties which could be his wife, teammates or his superiors. I have lived on the spacecoast for 37 years so this book was of real interest to me and it put a personal side to my wonder filled memories of watching so many launches from the roof of our home with our boys. Or from the parking lot of an employer with customers and coworkers.