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 hypocrisy—whether large or small, left or right—with all the zeal of the dedicated reformer.

In Wolfe's work, it is seldom the subjects' lives or deeds per se that have drawn Wolfe's attention, but rather the particular style they affect in going about their business. The writer has no war [in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers], for example, with the charitable impulse of the radical chic crowd towards...