There's nothing in this world that certain white, small-town, God-fearing, airplane-flying boys hanker after so much as the right stuff. The right stuff cannot be described or explained. Anyone crass enough to try and put it into words ipso facto probably doesn't have it. Tom Wolfe is crass enough to try and put the right stuff into words, which ipso facto probably means he doesn't have it…. [But] writing about the right stuff and thinking about the right stuff from the point of ...

The Right Stuff represents a departure for the satirist, whose observant eye and caustic pen have impaled on the page a wide range of American social phenomena…. [By] and large, Wolfe's reporting, while being marvelously entertaining writing, has also represented a telling and trust-worthy point of view. His is one of those finely critical intelligences that can detect the slightest pretention or falsification in an official posture or social pose. And, when he does, he goes after the hypocris...

Over the years Tom Wolfe has set his original mind to caustic descriptions of people who have done much to nurse along American self-denigration…. In the process he has produced some of the most brilliant social criticism to see print, and allied himself with the defenders of this country…. Wolfe's formidable literary virtues are at work in [The Right Stuff], providing every bit of the graceful language that is always his strong suit, and, better, rendering a portrait of true old-fashio...

[A major share of The Right Stuff] is devoted to unraveling the mystique of the test pilot…. I lived at Edwards [Air Force Base] for four years and, improbable as some of Tom's tales seem, I know he's telling it like it was. He is the first gifted writer to explore the relationship between test pilots and astronauts—the obvious similarities and the subtle differences…. Edwards hotshots knew that the Mercury astronauts were just talking monkeys, sealed in their funny little...

Postures of glory came naturally to the first seven men to be chosen from the combative and competitive brotherhood of military test pilots, men constantly struggling to keep their places or climb the pyramid of achievement (Wolfe calls it a ziggurat but no matter), to display the proper qualities of classy and conspicuous bravery—the "right stuff" of the title. In his opening chapter—the best thing in [The Right Stuff]—Wolfe describes with passion and an appalling vividne...

Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff is about the first American astronauts, and it is not a great example of 'New Journalism'. Like all Wolfe's writing, it is not a great example of anything. If Wolfe described Judgment Day, he would somehow make it sound like July the Fourth in the Hamptons. The Right Stuff looks like Robert Redford in blue, and sounds like closing time on Cup Final night….

Tom Wolfe has never applied the techniques of fiction to nonfiction more carefully, more elaborately or more successfully than in The Right Stuff, his study of the American astronauts. Whether he is empathising with the fraught wife of a test-pilot, given reason to believe that her husband has just been killed, or chronicling the resentful emotions of war-heroes treated by scientists like laboratory specimens, Wolfe produces a compelling authenticity. Much of the narrative is exciting, and some of it is sur...