Postures of glory came naturally to the first seven men to be chosen from the combative and competitive brotherhood of military test pilots, men constantly struggling to keep their places or climb the pyramid of achievement (Wolfe calls it a ziggurat but no matter), to display the proper qualities of classy and conspicuous bravery—the "right stuff" of the title.

In his opening chapter—the best thing in [The Right Stuff]—Wolfe describes with passion and an appalling vividness what it is like to live with the accident statistics: the pressure of a by no means atypical run of bad luck, in which comrade after comrade is macerated, incinerated, crunched. But the pilots' fears are of failure, not death: "anything—even the great Kaboom!—was better than hearing bingo over your earphones". They are all those un-British things like raunchy and feisty and gung-ho: on the ground, the right kind of sleaziness and liquor and cars and chicks constitute Fighter Jock Heaven. The irony is that, picked for the top-status job of all, they find fame, fortune and fun all right, but precious little flying…. How the astronauts reasserted, against all the pressures, their fly-boy values, is one of Wolfe's themes….

Wolfe's other main theme is the contrast between the patchy but glorified performance of the spacemen and the steady and controlled progress of the piloted and manoeuvrable rocket planes of the X-series: these danced around in shallow space at hypersonic speeds, even offering their crew a taste of weightlessness. Wolfe implies, though he does not say, that the planes might have won the race if government funds had not been staked on the more glamorous, not to say phallic, runner. But the thesis is not argued…. Wolfe plainly has little taste for technology: there are no scientists among his heroes, and doctors appear only as pompous and tyrannical, the butt of MASH-style jokes about enemas and urine samples.

If there's no thesis and the observations are untrustworthy, what's left is the wonderful Tom Wolfe style machine. Its operations are beguiling and irritating in equal proportions. He has Kipling's flair for the talk of men of action, and Kipling's infuriating urge to be obscure and knowing….

There's something disagreeably sly about this. In fact there's much in this skilful and self-regarding book I didn't like the taste of. If there's one thing more unlovable than the man of letters showing his contempt for physical valour, it's the man of letters fawning on physical valour. Wolfe contrives to do both at once.