This was the award for General Nonfiction (hardcover) during a period in National Book Awards history when there were many nonfiction subcategories. Having read a fair amount of books, I’m willing to admit that I don’t remember every one with perfect clarity. Often, even books I recall loving at the time retain only a distant glow. The stuff I liked was the sheer danger the test pilots went through and how a lot of their work got overshadowed by the bright appeal of astronaut program. And the unsettling idea of how much, despite being lauded as best pilots and heroes, the job of the first astronauts was supposed to be a glorified test subject in a small metal can, doing about the same as the astrochimps, but with realization of helpless danger that was there if anything went wrong. The funny moments of Pete Conrad and his rectal tube/barium enema low point that made me laugh for at least five minutes straight.

The film was later expanded into its titular franchise, including a television series and a documentary film.It reads too novelized, and it’s not a good thing. Somehow these very real people started feeling like characters as Wolfe’s omniscient narration in this persistently slightly frantic anxious style was emphasizing drama and petty rivalries, adding tension where a calm narration would do, unquestioningly putting the reader into each of the astronaut’s heads (chimps included), assuming what went in there, and doing its best to tie most things to that titular “right stuff”. Goldman, William. Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade. New York: Vintage Books USA, 2001. ISBN 0-375-70319-5.

I WANTED to like this. I wanted to learn about the men who made this mission, the ones brave enough to leave the planet and try to land on the moon, the ones that clearly had cojones the size of beachballs (that's the "right stuff" - spoiler alert)... but I could not make it past the writing to get there. The last part of the book slows down some again, but does have it's definite highlights, such as the "astronaut charm school" teaching such indispensable knowledge as what way your thumbs should be pointed, should you ever put your hands on your hips. (Which, as we all know, probably should be avoided altogether). Another great part is the failed Yeager attempt to set a new altitude record for the souped-up version of the F-104 fighter plane. Morganthau, Tom and Richard Manning. "Glenn Meets the Dream Machine." Newsweek, October 3, 1983, p. 36.Mercury "Friendship 7" on display in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall at the Museum in Washington, DC. Now, I think it's likely that he was trying to "be one of the guys" and act as cavalier about death as they had to be... but he wasn't "one of the guys". He was writing about them, interviewing them, and portraying THEIR story to readers who have no idea what that life is like. The author, a good author, would take all of that and clarify it, and present it in a way that doesn't change or take away from the experiences and interviews, but makes it feel real and substantial without being cruel about it. This just did not work for me. Wolfe made no secret that he disliked the film, especially because of changes from his original book. Goldman also disliked the choices made by Kaufman, saying in his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade that "Phil [Kaufman]'s heart was with Yeager. And not only that, he felt the astronauts, rather than being heroic, were really minor leaguers, mechanical men of no particular quality, not great pilots at all, simply the product of hype." [12]

Farmer, Jim. "Filming the Right Stuff." Air Classics, Part One: Vol. 19, No. 12, December 1983, Part Two: Vol. 20, No. 1, January 1984. The world froze, congealed, in that moment. Jane could no longer calculate the interval before the front doorbell would ring and some competent long-faced figure would appear, some Friend of Widows and Orphans, who would inform her, officially, that Pete was dead.Tom Wolfe was the perfect writer for this story. He not only puts you in the middle of everything that’s happening in the world with the Soviets but he provides an utterly realistic portrayal of a brotherhood of men who deserve to be looked up to and to be praised. I can attest to the reality he presents even though I wasn’t alive yet to witness the Space Race. But without the likes of such men as Alan Shepherd, Gus Grissom, and John Glenn, the future of military aviation and the NASA programs would not be where they are today. Wolfe also gets into the spouses lives and allows the reader to view the perspective of the wife who is waiting at home with all of the media and journalists waiting outside on their lawns to get their first reaction. Not only that, but he gets into the unspoken code the spouses operated under. A book about space program is exactly what I normally would get all “Oooh, shiny!” about. It’s the stuff I love dearly and will happily lap up. But this one — despite an interesting promise it kept periodically hitting the false notes, feeling a little too much, too overdone, too weirdly subjective, too reliant on creating excitement out of everything, too gleefully dwelling on the gruesomeness of tragedies, too reliant on verbal lists like the one I just created, plus ellipses and exclamation points. The storyline also involves the political reasons for putting people into space, asserting that the Mercury astronauts were actually a burden to the program and were only sent up for promotional reasons. Reasons for including living beings in spacecraft are barely touched upon, but the first option considered was to use a chimpanzee (and, indeed, chimpanzees were sent up first).