The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe left a sour taste in my mouth with the way the deaths were described. I think the goriness of the book is best explained through an excerpt.

“Conrad stood there soaking wet in the swamp bog, wondering what the hell to do. It was a struggle to move twenty feet in this freaking muck. Every time he looked up, he was looking into a delirium of limbs, vines, dappled shadows, and a chopped-up white light that came through the tree-tops – the ubiquitous screen of trees with a thousand little places where the sun peeked through. Nevertheless, he started wading back out into the muck and the scum, and the others followed. He kept looking up. Gradually he could make it out. Up in the treetops there was a pattern of broken limbs where the SNJ had come crashing through. It was like a tunnel through the treetops. Conrad and the others began splashing through the swamp, following the strange path ninety or a hundred feet above them. It took a sharp turn. That must have been where the wing broke off. The trail veered to one side and started downward. They kept looking up and wading through the muck. Then they stopped. There was a great green sap wound up there in the middle of a tree trunk. It was odd. Near the huge gash was…tree disease…some sort of brownish lumpy sack up there in the branches, such as you see in trees infested by bagworms, and there were yellowish curds on the branches around it, as if the disease had caused the sap to ooze out and fester and congeal – except that it couldn’t be sap because it was streaked with blood. In the next instant – Conrad didn’t have to say a word. Each man could see it all. The lumpy sack was the cloth liner of a flight helmet, with the earphones attached to it. The curds were Bud Jennings’s brains. The tree trunk had smashed through the cockpit canopy of the SNJ and knocked Bud Jennings’s head to pieces like a melon.”

            -The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

With this description, I begin to wonder if these events even truly occurred. Any pilot in Pete Conrad’s field would just say that Bud Jennings augered in and died. I read in the introduction that Tom Wolfe had trouble getting any astronaut to talk to him. If this is characteristic of his writing, then I am not surprised.

Overcoming Anxiety

Although very bland and dry, Overcoming Anxiety by Helen Kennerley was a welcomed relief from The Right Stuff. I would equate Overcoming Anxiety to Feeling Good by David Burns. It was written in 1997, references Aaron Beck’s work on CBT almost as much, and includes similar categorizing, and exercises. Although the book may have some merit, it is difficult to squeeze out of it what is actually useful and applicable to everyday life.