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Rating: 
Summary: There are aviation memoirs...
Review: ... and many of them have honored places in my library: Colonel Robert Scott's "God Is My Co-Pilot", Heinz Knoke's excellent and sadly unknown "I Flew for the Führer", Bob Hoover's "Forever Flying", Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger's "Lost Moon" (which is as much an autobiography of Lovell as a recounting of the Apollo 13 incident)... ... and then there's this book. If you go into "The Wrong Stuff" expecting another self-congratulatory throttle-jockey memoir (not that there's anything wrong with those :), you'll be sorely disappointed, because John Moore isn't the self-congratulatory throttle-jockey type. He seems frankly surprised that he survived his aviation career, and his tongue-in-cheek delight at being alive permeates the work. Somehow, this man managed to wind up involved in some of the wackiest projects in aviation history, and his wry reminiscences make this the funniest flyboy book in history. I'm just amazed, with his karma, that Moore didn't end up testing the Pogo Planes. Highly, highly, highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: After the reviews, a real disappointment...
Review: A friend of mine has praised this book to the skies, so I bought a copy, expecting cover-to-cover laughs and revealations. Instead, what I got was a -very- disorganized, rambling series of partial recollections which were, despite the disclaimer in the introduction, the memoirs of a single pilot. Most of the stories failed to be funny in any way and were only moderately shocking. Most irritating of all was Chapter Twelve, which dealt with the author's anger at the Tailhook scandal/witchhunt and which had absolutely, positively nothing at all to do with anything else in the book. The chapter didn't belong. It was a distraction. Had any editing been done on the book, it should have been deleted entirely. There were some good parts, and the first two-thirds of the book would be quite nice with some serious re-arranging and reworking to present a coherent and orderly progression of events. The material about test-flying the Cutlass and the obscenely stupid FlexDeck program are must-reads, but the section on Apollo 1 adds nothing to the reams of material written about that tragedy, and the material on Mr. Moore's training runs hot and cold. As a minor note, the tendency to use technical terms without explaining them to the casual reader makes for difficult reading in some spots. All in all, if I'd found this in a library first, I never would have bought it; now that I have it, I can't recommend it to others, but I won't be giving my copy away either. Kris Overstreet
Rating:
Summary: A Great,Easy Read.
Review: Cdr. John Moore tells it like it is (or was), back then when test flying was not as sophisticated as it is now, along with the trials of the line Carrier Pilot, during "The Korean Thing". An easy, can't-put-it-down read which had me up 'till 4 AM. It gives the reader a poignant, down-to-earth glimpse of life as he saw it and lived it, often on the edge.
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