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One thing that blows my mind about Tom Wolfe's book


We all know Tom Wolfe wrote The Right Stuff and yes, it is a great book that I recommend to everyone. However, I never understood why he didn't continue writing about the Apollo manned missions to the moon.
A few years later an author named Andrew Chaikan DID write the definitive book about the Apollo missions, it just would have been much more interesting if Tom Wolfe would have tackled the biggest adventure of the 20th Century!

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Some of what Wolfe wrote was pure BS. For example, Gus Grissom being a screw-up. If that was true, why did NASA make him the commander of a Gemini mission, then of the planned first Apollo mission?

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Very true, but he really was labeled as such by the media and NASA had an inquiry into how/why Gus's hatch blew prematurely. NASA stuck with Gus but his reputation with the public and media never recovered. As NASA went forward, Gus was at the very forefront of Apollo, very likely to slide into the first or second Apollo mission. Unfortunately, he lost his life and never got a chance to fulfill his lunar dream.

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Actually, Wolfe was vague about the circumstances of Grissom's capsule loss, as are we all since it's never been explained in the kind of detail NASA geeks like, instead Wolfe wrote a lot about how Grissom felt during the incident and the aftermath. Which is suspicious in of itself, because Grissom had died long before Wolfe started his wonderful book, and Grissom apparently wasn't given to talking about his feelings.

"The Right Stuff" is researched to hell and gone and is as deliciously readable as history gets, but some of the writing reaches such flights of fancy that some of it is hard to take seriously. Wolfe is the guy who told young writers "Don't write about what you know, KNOW MORE", after all, but he does like his purple prose.

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I'm pretty sure Gus went back and forth with the media about the hatch incident. The media was selling drama, making Gus look bad and he lashed back. Probably a lot of quotes by Gus are in the old Life Magazines. This was the only Tom Wolfe book I read and it was when I was a young airman in the Air Force. These test pilots were my heroes and this book showed both sides to that.
Also, Wolfe's description about how military life can be so difficult for the families, moving from base to base, stateside to overseas and back, etc. A LOT of it rang true to the experiences I was having as I started at Lackland Air Force Base, then moved to Whiteman AFB, Missouri, then on to Incirlik Air Base, Turkey to Tinker AFB, Oklahoma and on and on. Living on an AIr Force base is a subculture and he sure got a lot right about military life without being in the military himself. To put it onto the printed page as he did is incredible.

Right after TRS I read Chuck Yeager's autobiography and that was an even better book. Chuck's life story is really a history of the entire U.S. Air Force from before it's inception all the way into the 1970's!

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