The Right Stuff

De: Tom Wolfe

Narrado por: Dennis Quaid

From "America's nerviest journalist" (Newsweek) - a breathtaking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the true heroism and courage of the first Americans to conquer space. "Tom Wolfe at his very best" (The New York Times Book Review)

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 The Right Stuff a classic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Tom Wolfe is the author of more than a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University and a PhD. in American studies at Yale. He lives in New York City.

ABOUT THE NARRATOR

Dennis Quaid is renowned for his distinct portrayals in both comedic and dramatic roles over the past forty years. Quaid can next be seen in Roadside Attraction's faith-based film I Can Only Imagine which will be released on March 16, 2018.

Dennis most recently stared in Crackle's auctioneering drama The Art of More on which he also served as an executive producer. On the big screen, he was recently seen starring in Universal's A Dog's Purpose as well as in the fact-based drama Truth. He will next begin filming the third season of the BAFTA award-nominated television series Fortitude and recently completed production on Lionsgate's Kin with James Franco.

Quaid began to gain attention in the late 1970s for roles in such films as Breaking Away before gaining public and critical acclaim for his role in the 1983 release The Right Stuff. Other notable credits include The Rookie, The Day After Tomorrow, Traffic, Vantage Point, Frequency, The Parent Trap, and Soul Surfer. For his role in Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven he won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Online Film Critics Society Award for Best Supporting Actor and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male. In 2010 he was nominated for numerous awards including a SAG Award®, an Emmy© and a Golden Globe© for his portrayal of Bill Clinton in the TV Movie, A Special Relationship.

©1979 Tom Wolfe (P)2017 Audible, Inc.

Great Story

I never saw the movie but I knew the gist of it. I jumped into this because I wanted to hear about a few of my heroes and how they became astronauts. The stories were great but two parts really stick out in my mind. The first is the unflappable faith the test pilots have in the machine. Failures cannot be the machine's fault. It is always the pilot's fault. The second is the image toward the end. I would have loved to see Chuck Yeager walking on the riverbed with Neil Armstrong talking about the test flight. Oh to be a fly on that wall.

Quaid still has the Right Stuff

Dennis Quaid, who starred in the movie as Gordo Cooper, “the best pilot you ever saw,” is the perfect narrator for this mid-century pop culture classic. Quaid nails the folksy, devil-may-care drawl of the hot fighter jet pilot, at times sounding like he has spent a little too much time at Pancho Barnes’ Fly Inn, but what the hell. What a ride! I loved every minute. With the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing this summer, it’s the perfect time to revisit one of my all time favorite books.

Flying and drinking and drinking and driving

Every once in a while, you get an audiobook that’s such a perfect pairing of reader and writing that the thing takes on a sort of life of its own. You inhabit it. Or it inhabits you. You start using its vocabulary in everyday speech (“Roger”, “A-OK”, “Copy that”), You ponder its ideas (astronauts as throwbacks to the single combat warriors of the Bible and Homer, for example). And when it’s all over, you miss it.

This is history written by a superb journalist, with an edge that a professional historian would never dare to wield; prose that breathes the spirit of the people, places and events it describes. Managing to be cynical, sarcastic, patriotic, heroic and funny by turns (and sometimes simultaneously) Wolfe’s vivid picture of the fighter jock’s life and mental outlook—summed up in the title of this review—jives completely with my experience of living near an Air Force base for the past decade.

And Dennis Quaid is true to his script, reflecting the brashness—and some of the envelope-pushing—that drove the flyers he’s telling us about. Overall, he’s in perfect sync with the cadence and spirit of Wolfe’s explosive prose. But words get slurred (“patri-ism” for “patriotism”) or mispronounced (“per-sick-quit-ees” for “prerequisites”), his French accent is execrable and, every once in a while, a sentence doesn’t quite make sense. Then again, it really kinda doesn’t matter because before you can start carping, you’re being hurtled forward like an astronaut in a Mercury capsule—sorry guys, I meant “spacecraft”—to the next stage of this extraordinary story.

Six Stars

I really wish I could give this six stars. This is one of the best books I've ever ready, and Dennis Quaid's narration is outstanding. I love history books, and I have read many. This one stands out in its unique structure and presentation. Tom Wolfe's story reads more like a novel than history. This book chronicles the early year's of America's manned space program and provides great detail without being boring. I cannot recommend this enough.

The Right Stuff has The Right Stuff!

Hearing this book read by Dennis Quaid (who also acted in the film) was a treat!