[New York: Macmillan, 1995]
For a long time, I didn’t think I got it with Tom Wolfe. As a young reporter in the early 1970s, I wasn’t sure why my colleagues — all a few years older — revered him so much. I tried The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and it gave me a headache. But then his stuff on the astronauts (“Post-Orbital Remorse”) began appearing in Rolling Stone. He was writing about a world I knew — the military life — and when he eventually finished his big book on the astronauts, The Right Stuff (1979), I was sold on the dude. At the time, I was exiled to the guest room in my house because I was filthy-dog sick, with a nine-months pregnant wife, awaiting the birth of my first child. The Right Stuff came in the mail and enchanted me. I’d read it, then fall into a Nyquil-induced coma and dream about it. The day I finished it, my daughter Sarah was born. After The Right Stuff, I decided to go back and read everything Wolfe has written and realized what a dumb ass I’d been before. It was a pleasure to do this book. I spent two years in research and three weeks in writing (I wrote the whole thing while my then-girlfriend was on vacation in Latvia). When Wolfe read it, he said that it made him remember a lot of things he’d forgotten about his life. He still speaks to me, so he must not hate it.