The Right Stuff

xi, 368 pp. Inspiration for the 1983 film starring Ed Harris, Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn, Chuck Yeager, Dennis Quaid, and Fred Ward. Millions of words have poured forth about man's trip to the moon, but until now few people have had a sense of the most engrossing side of the adventure; namely, what went on in the minds of the astronauts themselves - in space, on the moon, and even during certain odysseys on earth. It is this, the inner life of the astronauts, that Tom Wolfe describes with his almost uncanny empathetic powers, that made this book a classic.