The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe

It all really began in the early 1970s with a question that writer Tom Wolfe put to some Apollo astronauts: What makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse? Wolfe was fascinated by the simple old-fashioned courage of these men, especially in light of the fact that the era he and the astronauts inhabited was very much the era of the anti-hero. Unfortunately for Wolfe the astronauts were not inclined to answer his question, and for a good reason: the answer was complicated. The more Wolfe pondered, the more he realised that to find his answer he would have to ...  Read the complete review