Friday Reads: The Right Stuff

Happy Friday! We hope you're safe and well, wherever you are riding out the coronapocalypse. It takes more than a pandemic to keep us from reading, so today Adam is going to tell us about The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe.

Adam Pellman is reading The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

The Right Stuff relates the story of the United States' first man-in-space program, Project Mercury, focusing on the professional and personal lives of the seven former test pilots who became our nation's first astronauts. Spanning the early years of pre-Mercury flight tests and the initial training of the astronauts, all the way up through the orbital space flights and end of the program in 1963, Wolfe's book manages to capture the inner life of these men as well as the technical details of spaceflight, all with Wolfe's characteristic humor and a surprisingly informal tone. Wolfe's writing style takes some getting used to (so many exclamation points!), but it lends itself to nonfiction just as well as it does the grand satire of his decade-defining novels The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full.