On my shelf this sits next to my copy of Zodiac, well, at least until I return that one to the Cabin. I think I either bought this copy at that huge used bookstore just north of SOHO in Manhattan, or much earlier. It might have been a quarter book, as in it cost just a quarter. I wish I remembered.
About the only thing it shares with Zodiac is the status of non-fiction. Robert Graysmith, the writer of that other book, was a cartoonist and researcher who wrote that book because he had all the data. It kinda reads like that as well.
Tom Wolfe was a ground breaking journalist who showed that the tools of fiction writing could be used to write non-fiction pieces. He led a journalistic revolution that had/has many followers and disciples, and even shoot-offs like Gonzo journalism, a thing that HST reluctantly birthed into existence.
I remember "reading" The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test when I was in 6th grade, and here by "read" I mean "read most of the words on each page", but you might be able to guess what I took from it.
This book though, The Right Stuff, touched something I was really into as a kid: becoming an astronaut.
It covers some of the ballsiest men in American--or any--history: the test pilots. Chuck Yeager being the top guy, we see how their days go. They come to work and get onto a plane that nobody has ever flown, or, even knows if it can fly. Then they try and fly the bastard. Many of these guys died, and only the most fearless and badass stayed alive.
It was from this crop of guys that the first set of astronauts was taken. Only the cream of the crop was desired, but they mandated that the astronauts have a college degree. Once it came out that there was very little piloting going to be going on, most guys looked disparagingly upon the program. Once the mandate that a degree be held by a candidate came out, thereby denying Yeager, generally seen as the top test pilot, the amount of respect for the program dwindled among the ranks of the pilots.
After the gentleman were chosen, and America's reaction to them was discovered, everybody then wanted to be an astronaut. At first, even the word "astronaut" wasn't taken seriously by the pilots, who refused to use it.
The book discussed the invisible ziggurat that pilots climb during their careers, and how easy it is to fall off and fuck their prospects up. It also delves into the concepts of "Single Combat" and ancient Africa to explain the frenzy the American public was whipped into over the space race with the Soviets.
Such is the outlook and direction of Tom Wolfe. Instead of ending the book with an anecdote about some astronaut, like the film does, with the easygoing pilot falling asleep on the launchpad, he ends it with one from the top test pilot of all, the first man to break the sound barrier, Yeager himself.
I remember reading, and re-reading the final scene a few times on the subway, and then boring my coworkers with it because it struck me as so fantastic, so hyperreal, and right in the character of old Chuck, one of America's forgotten wild men.
Okay, here it is (I fought with myself about whether to tell the story or not): Yeager, now an instructor with the Air Force, hears about a new plane arriving at the base, and decides to take it out for a test--without real permission. Who in the tower is going top stop Chuck Yeager? He gets up into the air and notices certain design flaws, and get the plane into an out of control stance hurtling through the air. His only chance it to stall it out, shoot out the back parachute, get it pointed down, then cut the 'chute and try to jump start it in the fall. He gets all that ready, stalled out and hanging on the parachute, pointing down. He drops the chute, but the flaps were stuck and he was back into an uncontrolled spin. He decides that it over, and finally blows the hatch. He and his chair are blown free of the jet, but the explosive fuel that launches the chair during an ejection sprayed all over his helmet.
It burned through his helmet, and then started burning his face. He's falling through the air, his plane will be crashing in a fiery mess in the desert soon, and his face is on fire inside his helmet, which he's struggling to remove. Finally he gets his helmet off, opens his shoot in time, which dissolves mostly from the fuel, but not too much before slowing down enough to survive the impact with the desert floor. his right eye has been blinded, but, as it turns out, only temporarily. He recovers fully, and the scars on his face don't even hold.
It was Yeager who got the other pilots to finally start to respect the would-be astronauts. While there wasn't a whole lot of "piloting" going on, he pointed out, it took a certain kind of man to sit on a tube of explosives and then light the match.
Still an exciting read, I'd recommend it to anyone interested in an isolated section of the late '50s or early '60s that's devoid of popular-culture connections, or about how the creation of NASA affected the military on a personal level.
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