The Right Stuff

A funny and detailed recollection of the beginning of the space era in the cold war. Maybe the style is too informal, but that only adds into this child's nonsense of the pilot's ego. And it is funny, in the sense that the tragedy of the course of all science progress in the name of war, or americanism, or democracy, was almost absurd. All the lives lost, all the animals mistreated only for keeping pace with the eternal enemy, all the paraphernalia between patriotism and the pilot's internal envy.

It is a great work of journalism, and a great read.Wolfe details all of this in a paragraph in the first pages of the book:

And in any event, the way they talked about it, with such breezy, slangy terminology, was the same way they talked about sports. I twas as if they were saying, "He was thrown out stealing second base." And that was all! Not one word, not in print,not in conversation—not in this amputated language!—about an incinerated corpse from which a young man's spirit has vanished in an instant, from which all smiles,gestures, moods, worries, laughter, wiles, shrugs,tenderness, and loving looks—you, my love!—have disappeared like a sigh, while the terror consumes a cottage in the woods, and a young woman, sizzling with the fever, awaits her confirmation as the new widow of the day.