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> one of the greatest non-fiction stylists

Sure, if all you're looking for is style.

As a person interested in aviation (and a good story), 'Yeager' is my favorite. The Right Stuff was a good experience, but I probably won't re-read it again.

I can heartily recommend 'The Right Stuff' by Tom Wolfe, where he gives a great description of how challenging it is for new pilots to learn this skill.

The Right Stuff --- one of my favorite books of all time.

While not a replacement for book, 'The Right Stuff' the movie is a great movie.

You might like to read The Right Stuff [1], the film is good too but the book goes into quite a bit of detail on how the astronauts were seen as representing the nation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_%28book%29

If you like reading about this, I recommend "The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolfe.

He also explores the interesting dynamics of how the astronauts using "simple" rockets became more famous than pilots who achieved stick-based flight to near-space levels.

Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff talked about this too, with the Mercury astronauts being called spam in a can.

Probably the most famous (rightly so).

If you like Yeager, I highly recommend reading his memoirs - it makes The Right Stuff seem like an amateur hour aviation book.

Read the novel "The Right Stuff" for more background. There was a disagreement as to whether astronauts would be pilots of their spacecraft or mostly along for the ride.

I wonder if any of that desire was responsible for the Space Shuttle.

The Right Stuff is an entertaining movie, but beware that it plays fast and loose with a lot of facts, and also does a great disservice in its depiction of the beloved and respected Gus Grissom, who was killed in the Apollo 1 fire and was most definitely not the cave man/coward in the movie.

The Right Stuff is non-fiction, not a novel.

For aspiring fighter pilots: The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe.

Too sad.

Just want to say that the mentioned book "The Right Stuff" exists also as a 3 hours movie from 1983. You'll find it on youtube, too (two parts).
I really recommend this movie to everyone who's into spaceflight. Full with details and beauty, a true homage.

A good movie about aerospace and the origins of the U.S. space program (it's also a book) is "The Right Stuff".

I don't think the X-15 is in it, but it can give you an idea of what the times were like http://www.impdb.org/index.php?title=The_Right_Stuff

It's still worth a watch today.

"The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolfe has quite a bit on this topic. The answer seems to be habitualizing or "adapting out" fear. According to the book, when John Glenn was launched into space for the first time, the situation was so familiar that his heart rate held at around 70bpm.

If you're interested in the dead end of space planes, Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" covers how the program lost out to the Mercury system.

In the book The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe writes about some thing similar, the first astronauts in the Mercury program had nothing much to do, and NASA was considering choosing people like trapeze artists, who are used to stress and high acceleration for the role.

You've got to read The Right Stuff[1], it's fantastic. Tom Wolfe paints the ethos of the era perfectly, and if you have any interest in this period, early NASA, or the guys themselves it's a must-read.

I'd also recommend Chuck Yeager's autobiography[2] as another fantastic read that gives you a feel for what life was like for elite test pilots.

1: https://smile.amazon.com/Right-Stuff-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0312427565...

2: https://smile.amazon.com/Yeager-Autobiography-Chuck/dp/05532...

After recently reading that Vostok 1 was not designed for a soft landing and that Gagarin had to eject and parachute during re-entry, I realized that a Soviet Union centered version of The Right Stuff could make a compelling story.

> I'm curious how that changes from the first book to the twenty-first?

For your answer, compare "The Right Stuff" (1979) to "I am Charlotte Simmons" (2004), both by Tom Wolfe. The second book, apart from being unreadable, seems not to have been written by the same person.

> it makes The Right Stuff seem like an amateur hour aviation book

I doubt that.

The Right Stuff is not simply a book about Yeager. And while Yeager is a fascinating and exciting man and truly a hero, Tom Wolfe is one of the greatest non-fiction stylists of the twentieth century. I would be very surprised if Chuck Yeager could write, or commission a ghost writer, with one tenth the chops of Tom Wolfe.

It is often said that many pilots emulate Chuck Yeager's voice.[1] Yeager was a US test pilot and jet flying ace.

Tom Wolfe has a great novel about Yeager and other test pilots called "The Right Stuff."

[1] https://www.wearethemighty.com/history/silky-smooth-chuck-ye...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np272lmVRkU

Anyone taking this ride for the prestige of being an astronaut, rather than intrinsic reasons, is likely to find that, for most people, suborbital flight doesn't count. Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" describes John Glenn's understanding of this perception (though in general, that book is more journalism than history (and the movie is a movie.))

I recently finished Rocket Men by Robert Kurson, about Apollo 8. That was great. But the ultimate book on Apollo for me is still Chaikin's 'Man on the Moon' which details all of the Apollo missions from interviews with the astronauts not too long after, as well as some of the pre-Apollo stuff (Gemini and Mercury).

Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff is also great to understand the test pilots from which most of the astronauts were picked.

Read "The Right Stuff" for the first time recently. I didn't find myself particularly invested in the Mercury astronauts' story, but Wolfe's utterly delightful prose made it hard to pull away. Loved the mantra-like phrases that his writing would circle around: climbing the ziggurat, being left behind, single-combat warriors, the titular right stuff (among many others). Coupled with the fast-talking pace and the incredibly vivid language (waters "about as clear as the eyeballs of a poisoned bass!"), it almost read like poetry at times.

Oh, and the book was hilarious! It's rare that I find myself laughing out loud at literature, but Wolfe's descriptions were just so absurd and clever.

If you can find a torrent, I highly recommend Michael Prichard's Books on Tape recording. The quality is low but the narration is just exceptional.

RIP.

What if Philip Roth wrote some science fiction about Erlang? Would that be okay?

I'm kidding to make a point: marriage is seldom a 100% ideal proposition. In my house we intermingle our books. Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" is next to Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff". The benefit of sharing an amazon account makes up for the fact that I may see books she's interested at Amazon.com.

> What NASA needs most, he says, is some imaginative PR... The astronauts he has met could provide reams of picturesque copy; they are hard-drinking, fast-living, generally “wild and weird.”

The editor of Rolling Stone was certainly paying attention! It sounds like they sent Tom Wolfe to cover Apollo just a short time after publishing this. His book, The Right Stuff, would cement the image of those first American astronauts in just this “wild and weird” frame.

If you're interested in the extraordinary characteristics that are needed to be a test pilot or an astronaut or the early history of the space program, check out Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" ( http://www.amazon.com/Right-Stuff-Tom-Wolfe-ebook/dp/B00139X... )

It also puts the Virgin and other private space travel experiments into context. This stuff is really hard and dangerous. It takes a special breed of people to sign up for it and then figure out how to survive when things go wrong or when things are less than ideal. It's not just guts but also a lot of intelligence and the ability to stay calm when you are less than a minute from oblivion. Chuck Yeager had a number of close calls.

Oh man. So many.
Anything by Brandon Sanderson. Most of his stuff takes place in the same fantasy universe, and some of the series are starting to cross over. Stormlight Archives is the crown jewel. Edit: each series takes place on a different planet in the universe with a separate (well thought out) magic system. Different books in different series start to reveal the why's and how's and how it is all linked.

Enjoying the Expanse series right now by James Corey, sci-fi with us living on Mars and in the belt, when a dangerous alien self-replicating molecule shows up.

If science fiction is your thing, I can't recommend higher the Hyperion series.

Freedom and Deamon by Daniel Suarez were really fun, a muder mystery where the murderer is dead and uses an advanced AI to do his dealings.

The Martian was fun, if a little shorter than I typically like. Better than the movie, as nearly always.

I could go on. Gaah! So fun!

Edit: usually not a history person, but also really enjoyed The Right Stuff read by Dennis Quaid. The start of the space program.

I might start with 'The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby' which is a collection of his essays. The first chapter of 'The Right Stuff' is worth reading by itself. The rest of the book is fascinating but drags on a bit in the last third. My favorite is 'The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test'. I haven't gotten around to reading 'Bonfire of the Vanities' however so I can't really comment on that.

When I was young, I just thought astronauts were lucky people who got to go to space. It wasn't until I got older and read through their bios (and such books as, The Right Stuff), that I realized they were actual uber-men/women...not only good at operating a space shuttle, but at a hundred other skills that may be needed when you're in space, including musical performances.

> ... he wouldn't make the same mistake and could therefore rationalize his continued participation in the sport.

In the early chapters of the book The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe says that this was the normal attitude among test pilots about their brethren who crashed and died. "How could anybody fail to check his hose connections? And how could anybody be in such poor condition as to pass out that quickly from hypoxia? ... One theorem was: There are no accidents and no fatal flaws in the machines; there are only pilots with the Wrong Stuff. (I.e., blind Fate can't kill me.)"

That's not clear at all to me. This system sounds extremely complex (which could be one of the causes of the problem!), so I don't see how we can assume that no bugs got introduced, nor that execution speed is the only metric that matters.

Perhaps the existing socket-based solution simply used a bad timeout, and instead of a weekend of work to completely change the architecture of the system, it could have been fixed by changing one number in a configuration file. That would have been much lower risk, and not affected any other functionality, test suites, debugging practices, support procedures, etc.

Software is still a young field that celebrates youth, and single combat warriors, like "Mel". It reminds me of Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff", about the U.S. space program back in the 1950's. One person could and did go do crazy heroic things that helped a single flight succeed. Eventually, space flight grew up, and NASA today barely even mentions the names of their contributors and collaborators. They'd never put up with cowboys like that any more. That's not how you achieve successful, repeatable results in complex systems.

Or maybe I'm just getting old.

Reminds me of the book The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. He describes the start of the US space program, being a test pilot, public reaction to being a astronaut...
Astronauts were treated like gods back then, or as Wolfe called them "single combat warriors". I think a lot of that sentiment still exists today.

The introductory chapter to the Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe) describes this well. The sheer cost of lives among test pilots in the 40s and 50s is shocking by today's standards, but this was a generation that went through Normandy and Bataan.

That said, that doesn't explain why the aircraft of WW2 and the early Cold War took just a few years to go from drawing board to combat, in the days before advanced computer modelling, yet it took 20 years to build the Eurofighter. I suspect the lack of accountability of military contractors coupled with government collusion (jobs programs over national security) has more than a bit to do with it.

In the "The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolfe, he mentions quite a few situations where the Mercury astronauts would visit factories and facilities in charge with building various components, and in all of these cases there was the same gist of "be really careful with your work or these nice young boys could die." So this practice existed from the very beginning of the American space program.

I wonder if any of that still happens these days. Probably way less now when American astronauts hitch a ride on the Soyuz.

The Right Stuff - Test Pilots

Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis - Medical Profession

McTeague - Frank Norris - Dentistry

Two Years Behind the Mast - Dana - Sailor in thr Merchant Marine

The Red and the Black - Stendahl - Catholic Clergy

The Centurions - Jean Larteguy - Infantry/Special Ops

I always suggest reading fiction, it is a good source for lot of incidental knowledge about various aspects of life.

Can anyone recommend books/novels on the English legal profession? Thanks.