Book 11: The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

I wanted to get a little bit of non-fiction into my rotation of books and this will be the first.  I've seen bits and pieces of the movie version of this book, but have never seen the whole thing.  It is considered one of the best non-fiction books around and I've always been interested in air- and spacecraft so it seems a good fit.  My copy of the book has 436 pages so I need to read 63 pages a day to finish in a week.

REVIEW:  This was a really interesting non-fiction book.  It read more like a novel with the characters introduced, the story building to an exciting climax and the denouement at the end.  It tells the story of the birth of the Space Age in America, starting with the fighter jet test pilots and progressing through Project Mercury and the first human spaceflights.  The astronauts and test pilots of the book all appear as heroes in the classical sense, "single combat warriors" as Wolfe calls them.

All-in-all I really enjoyed this book.  I feel like I learned something about an era that I didn't really know much about.  It dragged a bit in some places but, since it is non-fiction, it is inevitable that some  parts will be more interesting than others.  I'd give this one a 9 out of 10.