Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glen, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Al Shepard, and Deke Slayton

We Seven could have been a wonderful book. It’s a collaborative work by the Mercury astronauts, telling about their experiences as some of the first people in space.

I heard of its existence several years before I was able to find a copy. Then, reading it, I realized that there are very good reasons that Tom Wolfe’s version of the events in The Right Stuff sold millions of copies and this one went out of print.

The story’s still great, but go with Wolfe’s version—evidently NASA’s training program didn’t involve a creative writing component.

B. Lee Cooper

Popular Music Perspectives is basically a book of lists, of the sort that used to take some friends in the publishing business to make it to the marketplace, and now can be found by the thousands if you type a few words into Google. My guess is that it was intended as a tool for professors who wanted to seem hip by referring to popular songs in their lectures. Obviously, any music group or song referred to by a college professor is immediately uncool, and any such group that appears in a published book for professors might as well start planning its reunion tours and “best of” albums. If you’re a professor who hasn’t yet learned to use Google, and who hasn’t yet learned that you’re not cool, go ahead and give this book a shot. It’ll help. Sure. Right.