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The setting is Atlanta, Georgia — a racially mixed, late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth and wily politicians. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta conglomerate king whose outsize ego has at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 29,000 acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife, and a half-empty office complex with a staggering load of debt.

Meanwhile, Conrad Hensley, idealistic young father of two, is laid off from his job at the Croker Global Foods warehouse near Oakland and finds himself spiraling into the lower depths of the American legal system.

And back in Atlanta, when star Georgia Tech running back Fareek “the Canon” Fanon, a homegrown product of the city’s slums, is accused of date-raping the daughter of a pillar of the white establishment, upscale black lawyer Roger White II is asked to represent Fanon and help keep the city’s delicate racial balance from blowing sky-high.

Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real estate syndicates — Wolfe shows us contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most admired novelist. Charlie Croker’s deliverance from his tribulations provides an unforgettable denouement to the most widely awaited, hilarious and telling novel America has seen in ages — Tom Wolfe’s most outstanding achievement to date.
Amazon.com Review
Ever since he published his classic 1972 essay "Why TheyAren't Writing the Great American Novel Anymore," Tom Wolfe has madehis fictional preferences loud and clear. For New Journalism's posterboy, minimalism is a wash, not to mention a failure of nerve. The realmission of the American writer is to produce fat novels of socialobservation--the sort of thing Balzac would be dishing up if he hadmade it into the Viagra era. Wolfe's manifesto would have had ahubristic ring if he hadn't actually delivered the goods in 1987 withThe Bonfire of theVanities. Now, more than a decade later, he's back with asecond novel. Has the Man in White lived up to his own mission?

On many counts, the answer would have to be yes. Like its predecessor,A Man in Full is a big-canvas work, in which a multitude ofcharacters seems to be ascending or (rapidly) descending the greasypole of social life: "In an era like this one," a character remindsus, "the twentieth century's fin de siècle, position waseverything, and it was the hardest thing to get." Wolfe has changedterrain on us, to be sure. Instead of New York, the focus here isAtlanta, Georgia, where the struggle for turf and power is at leastslightly patinated with Deep South gentility. The plot revolves aroundCharlie Croker, an egomaniacal good ol' boy with a crumblingreal-estate empire on his hands. But Wolfe is no less attentive to apair of supporting players: a downwardly mobile family man, ConradHensley, and Roger White II, an African American attorney at a white-shoe firm. What ultimately causes these subplots to converge--andthreatens to ignite a racial firestorm in Atlanta--is the alleged rapeof a society deb by Georgia Tech football star Fareek "The Cannon"Fanon.

Of course, a detailed plot summary would be about as long asyour average minimalist novel. Suffice it to say that A Man inFull is packed with the sort of splendid set pieces we've come toexpect from Wolfe. A quail hunt on Charlie's 29,000-acre plantation, astuffed-shirt evening at the symphony, a politically loaded pressconference--the author assembles these scenes with contagiousdelight. The book is also very, very funny. The law firms, likeupper-crust powerhouse Fogg Nackers Rendering & Lean, are straight outof Dickens, and Wolfe brings even his minor characters, likeprofessional hick Opey McCorkle, to vivid life:

In true Opey McCorkle fashion he had turned up for dinnerwearing a plaid shirt, a plaid necktie, red felt suspenders,and a big old leather belt that went around his potbelly likesomething could hitch up a mule with, but for now he had cut off hisusual torrent of orotund rhetoric mixed with BakerCountyisms.

Customer Reviews (910)

Taking a novel too far
I love Tom Wolfe's work. Bonfire of the Vanities will always be one of my very favorites. But I was disappointed in this book. I really enjoy how Wolfe builds characters with great detail, but you can take this too far, as I think he did here. It drags on at times, veering away from the main story into needlessly exhaustive detail that did little to expand the characters.

But the worst part was the ending. I can hear Wolfe's publisher saying, "Dude, it's 700 pages already, wrap it up." After spending all those pages with their exhaustive detail, to basically end the book that suddenly with two minor characters telling me what happened, I felt cheated. Wolfe could have easily left out 100 pages of details and put a real ending on this book.

It's still a good story, but it will never be considered his best work. I would recommend any aspiring writers read it for a lesson on how not to write a novel. If Tom Wolfe's name wasn't on the cover, I suspect many people would have quit part way through, and it would have three stars at most.

YES!
Tom Wolfe at his best ... what a relief after Charlotte.Timeless.A great read.

Where did he come up with these names?
Decent read but was Tommy having flashbacks from his ECAT days when assigning character names? Or maybe it's just in Richmond that people have funny sounding and insipid names.

A Story in Full
This was my first Tom Wolfe novel, and it won't be my last.If someone had given me a brief synopsis of the basic storyline, I would have had zero interest in this book.However, as I had been wanting to try Tom Wolfe, I decided to start with this novel.From the beginning, I was hooked.The characters were real, the writing was superb, and I couldn't put it down.One of the best features of the novel was how each of the storylines ran parallel and intersected along the way.Also, Wolfe wrote about each character and sub-culture as if he really understood them and had walk in their shoes.This is really masterful writing and a work of art.Even though it is long, it was still a quick read.Highly recommended!

EXCELLENT
Simply the best contemporary novel I've read thus far...you won't be able to put this down...and if you manage to you won't be able to get the story off your mind. For months after I walked around my house bumping my knee on furniture and refusing to show any signs of pain...read it and you'll be able to relate...BRILLIANT ... Read more

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The other bone Wolfe has to pick is with the proliferation of arttheory, particularly the sort purveyed by postwar colossi likeHarold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, and Leo Steinberg. Decades after theheyday of abstract expressionism, these guys make pretty easy targets. Whatcould be more absurd, after all, than endless Jesuitical disputes about theflatness of the picture plane? So most of them get a highly comicalspanking from the author. It's worth pointing out, of course, that Wolfepaints with a broad (as it were) brush. If he's skewering the entire armyof artistic pretenders in a single go, there's no room to admit that JasperJohns or Willem DeKooning might actually have some talent. But as hewould no doubt admit, The Painted Word isn't about the history ofart. It's about the history of taste and middlebrow acquisition--and nobodyhas chronicled these two topics as hilariously or accurately as Tom Wolfe.--James Marcus ... Read more

Customer Reviews (42)

Hilarious expose of the art theory that ate art
This book made me laugh from start to finish. Wolfe's nuanced, insightful prose tears into a topic with a bland innocence that explodes into discovery of the absurd behind every corner. And here he picks a topic many of us are too afraid to explore, lest we be seen as uneducated peons.

If you've ever thought that our art community has become a bunch of stuffed shirts, who blather on about nonsense of little importance, here's a great skewer. Wolfe tracks the history of art going from "meaningful, interesting" to "obscure, theoretical." The title refers to the fact that art of the latter half of the 20th century left behind imitating reality and inspiring people for a basis in pure theory, or "the word." As a result, the art becomes like a painting about its own theory, and requires knowing its theory to appreciate.

Wolfe mocks all of the pointless and self-aggrandizing aspects of these movements in, and also gives you insight into the people getting involved in this stuff. He does so without taking a direct polemic stance. Instead, he explores details and tracks them from idea to completion to consequence, and in doing so, shows the Emperor wearing no clothes. Once he's got you onboard with his vision, he really lets fly and the comedy commences all over again!

"The Painted Word" forced me to re-evaluate my opinions about art, since I liked at least one artist he skewered, but even more gave me the ability to laugh at a much-needed mockery of one of life's ludicrous detours. As Wolfe says early in the book, we're afraid to speak up and say the Emperor has no clothes because opposing theory sounds ignorant and backward. But after reading this volume, it's hard to think that art itself has fallen into its own hype, and that it would be ignorant and backward to keep rubber-stamping it for the sake of seeming edumacated.

Modern art as emperor's new clothes
Ah the Modern Art - Alas! the common man is so incapable of perceiving depths. Only those with a few millions lying around can possibly be privy to this deep knowledge.

Modern art is a ponzi scheme, a strutting emperor with his new clothes. But there will forever be fools with money who will pay millions for badly done prints of Marilyn (Warhol). Its sad.

But I loved this book. It was a riot.

"You need a theory to understand Modern Art..."
He's not just joking around.
He's got some point which we can realize that it's true !!

Joking is just the way he represent his idea, he's not a fool !

Satire Paints On Top Of Irony
This send-up of contemporary art is one sided, unfair, perceptive, and entirely funny. Tom Wolfe exposes the art worlds' tangled intersections of irony and criticism, politics and painting, ego and eccentricity. Specifically, Wolfe's satire covers the dawn of Picasso and Modernism through the rise of Conceptual Art. This is a fascinating little satire, and Tom Wolfe at his best.

Art critic Clement Greenberg is identified as the leading critic and theorist; the center of a coloful cast of characters. "The Painted Word" peers into the inscrutiable relationships between artists, critics, patrons, fashionistas and curators. Wolfe sees contemporary art as an outgrowth of this cloistered social system.

If you are interested in contemporary art, read Wolfe's book along with "But Is It Art?" by Cynthia Freeland. Consider reading Freeland's book first, for it is a sympathetic history of art theory. Both books are incisive and enjoyable, and they make nice bookends for each other. An explicit theme of " But Is It Art?" and implicit criticism in "The Painted Word" is that the guiding theory for contemporary art is "criticism of life." This conception of art as a form a criticism is a source of Wolfe's satire, and some believe this meme has led art to a dead end.

As someone who enjoys, produces and collects conceptual art, I appreciate Wolfe's satire and agknowledge the problems he identifies. "Art for arts' sake," new for the sake of new, art as criticism, academic art, and the root-bound nature of the artworld are creating a chasm between art and viewers. And in a double irony, while contemporary art lampoons the conventions of conservative society, the art world itself is resistant to critical introspection.

There are exceptions. The Walker Art Center in my own back yard frequently explores new ground. There are fresh advances in the digital domain. Takashi Murakami is creating popular new aesthetic sensibilities and Matthew Barney is extending conceptual art into surreal mythic narrative. There is also a profusion of excelent new artwork in the world today. In fact, supply of new art far exceeds demand.

An underlying problem Wolfe circles around is that there are few compelling new theories for the role of contemporary art as a cultural force. A key question is: "What purpose and meaning does contemporary art offer?"

Professor E.O. Wislon offers some ideas in his book, Concilience. Wislon believes that all knowledge disciplines need more cross-disciplinary collaboration -- that the humanities need to feed science, and science needs to feed the humanities. Of course, this utilitarian viewpoint is open to rebuke as well.

Perhaps Wolfe has the last laugh in any event. Once the bonds between art and representation were severed, art became open to interpretation -- and criticism. Now, according to Wolfe, art itself has become a form of criticism, or "The Painted Word."

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
But Is It Art?: An Introduction to Art Theory

"it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture......and came out on the other side as art theory!"
Until I come across something that fundamentally invalidates this marvelous essay by Tom Wolfe, I'm going to think it is the most admirable, brilliant, and ironically effective expose of phony b.s. that I have ever read. Wolfe had the anatomical spheroids(testicular fortitude, to some) as well as the journalistic competence to reveal what most of us have suspected all along. The true meaning behind those incomprehensible works of abstract expressionism is ----zilch, nada, nothing!

Modern art of the mid 20th century was created and fostered by a small group of wealthy cognoscenti who gloried in being knowledgeable about so-called art which was inaccessible to the average person, and who reveled in being groupies of the bohemian artists. Self-interested "critics" added to the goofiness by continually refining the rules so they could discover ever newer and more abstract styles, which redounded to their personal fame and influence.

In this short book, Wolfe gives a concise history of this downward spiral in twentieth century painting, naming the critics who were the most prominent in bringing it about. The book brims over with honesty, wicked satire and (Oh my God! How square!)- COMMON SENSE. Whether it was deliberate chicanery or self-delusion aggravated by competitiveness, it seems the authorities of the art world allowed their chosen field to degenerate to a state of utter pretense.

Tom Wolfe, with the very sharp pin of his wit, has let a lot of hot air out of this particular balloon. Of course, there is the danger that Wolfe's criticisms will be over-applied to include all experimental types of art. The aversion of modern artists and critics to "literary" paintings - paintings which depict a recognizable meaning - finally led to mostly blank canvases with a few stripes, concentric circles, or letters of the alphabet. These were the sorts of artworks which resulted from the snobbish race toward nihilism, and they are what Wolfe nails so convincingly. ... Read more

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The last half of the book focuses more on New York and its denizens'endless combat for social status. The last piece, "The Big LeagueComplex," is like a 1964 warm-up exercise for The Bonfire of theVanities. --Tim Appelo ... Read more

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In The Time Of "Gonzo" Journalism
The subject of "Gonzo journalism", a journalistic literary trend started in the 1960s, and its most well-known practitioner, the late Doctor Hunter S. Thompson, has received much ink in this space over the past several years. The gist of this journalistic literary trend is that the writer gets "down and dirty" with whatever he or she is writing about and becomes an aspect of the story, one way or another. Now this notion set the traditionalists who worked under the so-called objectivist theory, "nothing but the facts, Jack" back on their heels. Of course, we all knew, and know, that this traditional approachwas honored in the breech more than the observance and that old Hunter was merely rubbing everyone's face in it. However, Hunter Thompson was not the only one trying to got to "edge city" in his writing in what now has become, academically translated, called the "new journalism". The writer under review, Tom Wolfe, also tried in a less zany way to break out of the traditional mold as well.

While Thompson was more than happy to tweak "edge city" Brother Wolfe, by his whole social existence, and by somethingdeep down in his training never really got all the way there. He never really pressed the issue of his own involvement in the story, nor would it perhaps have worked for him, but surely off of this early work he is onto something different from the run of the mill "straight" journalism of those days. Heck, even Hunter Thompson, argued, and argued strenuously, that most of his attempts at `gonzo" didn't work either. Here some of Wolfe's entries are brilliant, some much less so but that seems par for the course when one is experimenting with new forms.

For today's reader of this material it may be very, very hard to judge what Brother Wolfe was up to since, with few exceptions, most of the subject matter is very time-sensitive. Except maybe that "good old boy" piece he did on the legendary stock car racer Junior Johnson, "The Last American Hero." On that one he "kicked out the jams" to get the flavor of the social milieu that supported, and today still forms the core support ofthose stock car races. Another beauty of a story is the title one, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby", about the "hot rod' and customizing car craze and its culture among male teenagers that emerged after World War II. That sub-culture is still there, buried in the bushes, but in an age of computer-controlled cars that "mystique" has lost its edge.

My aunt read it long ago
I can't wait to read it my aunt read it when she was younger may she R.I.P

Insightful peak at the pre-sixties
Curiously, I picked up a copy of this book right before Christmas.My wife gave me a copy of Boom! by Tom Brokaw for Christmas.I decided to read Tom Wolfe first.I call it the pre-sixties in my review title ... this is because so many people now think of the sixties in terms of the late sixties counter-culture.This books paints the underlayer of what was going on before all that hippie/stop-the-war/change-the-world/woodstock stuff even started.The revolution was already happening and we didn't even know it yet. Nostalgic?Not really.This is a glimpse into Wolfe developing that all-seeing Tom Wolfe inner eye to look past what was happening to see and describe what was REALLY happening.This is an amazing book, very vibrant and entertaining and as much a context piece as it is an historical artifact.You want to understand the sixties?Read this book as a primer.

One of the best ever!
If you have an interest about our "car culture" and want to know where it sprouted from, this is your book.Maybr Wolfe's best book, right up there with the "Kool Aid Acid Test".Remebering, laughing and learning, all at the same time is pretty cool.

The Ultimate Bathroom Book
This is a collection of short tales about contemporary New York and America written in the early 1960s. As you might expect, Wolfe is a little more rough around the edges here, and so there is a little hit and miss. However, The Last American Hero, about driver Junior Johnson and the early beginnings of NASCAR, is breathtaking -here are the true buds of Wolfe's ideas on American Masculinity that were to flower in The Right Stuff. ... Read more

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Yet soon the focus shifts to the seven initial astronauts. Wolfe tracesAlan Shepard's suborbital flight and Gus Grissom's embarrassing panic onthe high seas (making the controversial claim that Grissom flooded hisLiberty capsule by blowing the escape hatch too soon). The author alsoproduces an admiring portrait of John Glenn's apple-pie heroism andselfless dedication. By the time Wolfe concludes with a return to Yeagerand his late-career exploits, the narrative's epic proportions and literarymerits are secure. Certainly The Right Stuff is the best, thefunniest, and the most vivid book ever written about America's manned space program. --Patrick O'Kelley ... Read more

Customer Reviews (97)

Sloppy e-book (The Right Stuff)
Shame on the publisher (Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) for the sloppy production of this ebook. The Right Stuff To care so little about the quality of their product is an insult to both the author and his readers.Don't buy the ebook version until the publisher makes it right.
The original book, as written by Tom Wolfe, deserves 5 stars.It's highly entertaining as well as informative.In this review, I'm only rating the quality of the ebook which has at least five dozen scanning errors, some of which are confusing and make it impossible to figure out what the author intended.Until the publisher fixes it, spend your money on something else.There's plenty of quality ebooks available.

HOW THE FUTURE BEGAN...
Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" is a fascinating, in-depth and personal account of the test pilots who pushed the envelope between 1947 and 1963. From Chuck Yeager's historic flight in the Bell X-1, through the seven missions of Project Mercury, and concluding with Yeager's near-catastrophic flight in the NF-104, the book is an enthralling look at the early days of NASA, and of the men and women who made it happen! Of particular interest are passages that didn't make it into the terrific film adaptation, including the failed attempt of astronauts such as Jim Lovell and Pete Conrad to be among the seven; NASA's "shunning" of Scott Carpenter after what they viewed as a near-disastrous flight of Aurora 7, and how Wally Schirra's flight of Sigma 7 was seen as proof of Carpenter's messy handling of the fuel, and; the near-success of test pilots outside of NASA to successfully put a man in space before the first Mercury flights. A thrilling book for readers of history and of good storytelling, I highly recommend it!
Grade: A-

the right stuff - the right stuff!
I have read The Right Stuff three times (a previous copy). I made the mistake of loaning the book to somebody but I don't recall who. I consider it such a "must have" book in my library that I have replaced it.

Great book, KINDLE version FULL OF ERRORS
Great book, completely flubbed by Amazon. Is it so hard to run a spell check on a Kindle manuscript before publishing it? This book is filled with ridiculous OCR screwups: letters cl being turned into a nonsensical d, for instance. And there are a lot of them. Amazon needs to fix this book and send us all an updated version that doesn't hurt our eyes or our brains.

One of the most entertaining nonfiction books I've read
Wolfe really keeps you on the edge of your seat, and despite being accused of taking liberties with the literal truth still creates a book that will teach you a great deal about the history of the early days of the American space program.This is one of the only nonfiction books I've read that reads like a well written novel.I will be diving further into the Wolfe cannon because this book was so good. ... Read more

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In Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe ranges from coast to coast observing 'the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000.' From teenage sexual manners and mores to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves thanks to the hot new fields of genetics and neuroscience; from his legendary profile of William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker (first published in 1965), to a remarkable portrait of Bob Noyce, the man who invented Silicon Valley, Tom Wolfe the master of reportage and satire returns in vintage form.
Amazon.com Review
Tom Wolfe's name is now so well known that the cover of his new collection bears just that: Tom Wolfe's name. No title, no picture, just the name, with an elegant design twining through it. Flip the thing on its side and you'll find that its title, Hooking Up, gives little idea of its function. But investigation soon reveals an oleo of reportage, fiction, and acrimonious name-calling. The latter, of course, makes for the best reading. In "My Three Stooges," Wolfe reviles the three big men of American letters--Updike, Mailer, and Irving--who cast aspersions on his second novel. Apparently, "the allergens for jealousy were present. Both Updike and Mailer had books out at the same time as A Man in Full, and theirs had sunk without a bubble. With Irving there was the Dickens factor." Wolfe gets in a lot of figures about what a big hit his book was with the reading public, and a few gentle reminders about other writers who were big hits of their times--little guys like Twain and Tolstoy.

Equally bitter fun are his two famous 1965 satires from the New York Herald Tribune. As always, Wolfe's titles lead you a good way into the actual stories: "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" and "Lost in the Whichy Thickets: The New Yorker." Wolfe, clotheshorse of note, gets off some of his best cracks at the expense of New Yorker editor William Shawn's fashion sense: "He always seems to have on about twenty layers of clothes, about three button-up sweaters, four vests, a couple of shirts, two ties, it looks that way, a dark shapeless suit over the whole ensemble, and white cotton socks." The rest of the reported pieces are unexceptional, and while the novella Ambush at Fort Bragg makes the most of its setting--a Dateline-like newsmagazine--it lacks the irresistible momentum required to drag most readers into a novella. Still, it's fun to watch the author reprise his lifelong role of unlikely underdog: between his sniping at the literary elite and his mocking of the precious New Yorker set, Tom Wolfe makes like a defender of the common man. --Claire Dederer ... Read more

Customer Reviews (69)

In The Time Of His Not Time
Recently in reviewing a couple of the early, influential, and culturally insightful works of the journalist/novelist Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flaked Streamline Baby I made the following comments that justly applied to those works but also provided a portent to future literary problems:

"The subject of "Gonzo journalism", a journalistic literary trend started in the 1960s, and its most well-known practitioner, the late Doctor Hunter S. Thompson, has received much ink in this space over the past several years. The gist of this journalistic literary trend is that the writer gets "down and dirty" with whatever he or she is writing about and becomes an aspect of the story, one way or another. Now this notion set the traditionalists who worked under the so-called objectivist theory, "nothing but the facts, Jack" back on their heels. Of course, we all knew, and know, that this traditional approach was honored in the breech more than the observance and that old Hunter was merely rubbing everyone's face in it. However, Hunter Thompson was not the only one trying to got to "edge city" in his writing in what now has become, academically translated, called the "new journalism". The writer under review, Tom Wolfe, also tried in a less zany way to break out of the traditional mold as well.

While Thompson was more than happy to tweak "edge city" Brother Wolfe, by his whole social existence, and by something deep down in his training never really got all the way there. He never really pressed the issue of his own involvement in the story, nor would it perhaps have worked for him, but surely off of this early work he is on to something different from the run of the mill "straight" journalism of those days. Heck, even Hunter Thompson, argued, and argued strenuously, that most of his attempts at "gonzo" didn't work either. Here some of Wolfe's entries are brilliant, some much less so but that seems par for the course when one is experimenting with new forms..."

Well, that was then (back in the 1960s) and now is now and we are confronted in "Hooking Up", a potpourri of essays, some from back in the days and some "fresh" with the limitation of Tom Wolfe's version of the now old, very old "new journalism" that has become something of the standard fare in the 24/7 journalistic world. Here is the "skinny": one of the best essay in the book , "Tiny Mummies" is a beautiful send-up of The New Yorker, its then chief editor, William Shawn and the whole pretentious New York literary magazine culture. But that effort dates from back n the 1960s. His title essay on the other hand, is a rather oddball and not particularly enlightening look at where the millennium is heading, or not heading. Most of piece does not stand up very well ten years later.

But then it only gets worst. Why? Old Tom has in that barren period since about "The Right Stuff" gotten cranky and crotchety as he joins the "death of communism" crowd with an offering of a "deadly" skewering of American elite college campuses and the equally "deadly" influence of "academic" Marxists, deconstructionists, and whatever else is going on in those "politically correct" precincts. Hardly tough work, although tedious I am sure. There are a couple of good pieces here besidethat New Yorker send-up but they are not "think" pieces, the thing that I admired about Wolfe when he was taking quirky risks to write off-the-beaten path stuff. One is "Two Young Men Go West" about the remnant of the Protestant ethnic that drove the men who drove the early computer revolution. The other is a novella, "Ambush At Fort Bragg" an sketch on the "inside" of the celebrity- making new media, both of the fifteen-minutes-of-famers and the actor-like star news anchors.

Solid, but ten years later, already feels stolid
"The average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic, or burglar-alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King blink." (3) So opens this millennial survey of how wired, networked, and tangled American lives became circa 2000. Twenty years since Wolfe's last essay collection, this marks a more sober set of reflections on what now, ten years later, seems an optimistic start to what proved a dimmer decade.

Wolfe argues, after the salacious "hooking up" of the sexy title takes but pp. 5-9 to elaborate, that science and academia, along with the media and consumers, connect in ways that allow affluence to rise and, unsurprisingly, intelligence to diminish for the norm. However, those in charge in Wolfe's world continue to wield power, and his fascination with the elite and how they clash with the proles makes this an engaging, if rather stolid, anthology.

The first section, "The Human Beast," examines the meeting of men with machines. Silicon Valley's birth comes with paralleling Josiah Grinnell, who took Horace Greeley's advice first-hand and went at least to the Middle West, of Iowa. His eponymous college schooled almost a century later Bob Noyce and classmates, who would spark the semiconductored, transistored post-WWII boom. This connects with an essay on E.O. Wilson's sociobiology, and while the pair move rapidly and neatly past everyone from Teilhard de Chardin to Nietzsche to Richard Dawkins, Wolfe manages to keep the material accessible. He sums up early Wilson: "He was a skinny runt, and then for years after that he was a beanpole." (78)Wolfe's prose style has calmed down, but he still keeps an eye out for telling details.

On the other hand, other entries here feel already familiar. True, it's always fun to laugh at "Rococo Marxists" and the silliness of an art world that favors a pile of rust by Richard Serra over realistic figures crafted by Frederick Kirk. Of Kirk's rejection by the cognoscenti: "Art worldlings regarded popularity as skill's live-in slut." (137) I agree with Wolfe in both critiques, but in his rush past "The Great Relearning," the piece is too brief to do justice to the topic, and "My Three Stooges" in its lengthy explanation of his book tour for "A Man in Full" saps the essay before it gets around to the more valuable comparison and contrast of naturalistic fiction with film. "Scene-by-scene construction" and "the liberal use of realistic dialogue" share with film the novel's craft; "interior point-of-view" and "the notation of status details," however, show the shortcomings of cinematic narrative. Wolfe defends his subject matter against the attacks of Mailer, Updike, and John Irving spiritedly, but when it comes to his own novella that follows, the interest for me lay more in the dialogue transcribing "Florida Panhandle illiteracy" and the way that two cameras can set up a sting operation and edit out dialogue than the actual plot of how a sleazy pair of operatives, one a manipulative schlub, one a blonde TV personality, pull off their set-up of three gay-bashing Army grunts who are suspected of killing a soldier at Fort Bragg, NC.

Last comes the old Wolfe, a piece that he wrote about Wallace Shawn of the New Yorker despite the magazine's refusal to cooperate officially. Wolfe frames the article for "New York" magazine with a lively reminiscence of mid-60s journalism that recalls the sting operatives above. "I'd heard of skeleton crews before, but this one was bones." (250) The original essay is fine, but for me any appeal lay in how the style that made Wolfe famous played off the more sober air of today's author.

To sum up, after having read his previous journalism collections, this one finds Wolfe spanning his usual series of class studies, social critiques, and media send-ups. It's useful to capture the mood around the year 2000. But placed next to his groundbreaking New Journalism, it's a less combative, more unassuming stance.

A Superb Stylist
After hearing Wolfe praised by William Zinsser, America's foremost writing expert, I decided I would give this book a read. Nothing short of amazing. His essay "In the Land of the Roccoco Marxists" is an amazing piece of satire, and "Sorry--Your Soul Just Died" shows why Tom Wolfe is still the master commentator on American culture.

The reason why I loved this book was that Wolfe has built up the reputationto say the things that most of us are thinking. If I was to question whether or not the sexual revolution has increased the mean happiness in the United States--A covert Puritan! If I was to praise the virtues of America, it's unprecedented free speech laws and an economy that allows a great deal of personal self determination--A Red Neck! If I was to point out how Academia now resembles a circus--A Midwestern Middlebrow! But when Tom Wolfe says it, people listen.

This wasn't as disjointed as previous reviewers made it out to be. The underlying theme throughout the book is that this accelerated sexual revolution is not an event in isolation. In The Land of the Roccoco Marxists, Wolfe talks about how the role of the intellectual since the time of Zola was to mock the views of the bourgeois class. This included mocking their moral convictions. The role of the modern intellectual, from HL Mencken to the literary critics in NY who praised and popularized Joyce, Fitzgerald, and about any other piece of literature designed to challenge the bourgeois morality, played a pivotal role in laying the foundation for this tumultuous revolution we are all still coping with.

Exuberance
The book is a collection of essays covering a variety of topics.One piece concerns the origins of Fairfield Semiconductor and Intel.Following the invention of the semi-conductor the micro-chip emerged.It was believed that the company needed to have an operating structure but not a social structure.

Two of the founders at Fairfield, Miller and Noyce, went on to start Intel in Santa Clara near Mountain View.Everyone would have stock options.There would be low partitions separating work areas.

Noyce had lived in Grinnell, Iowa.It was a bastion of dissenters.His generation was the end of the line, the last embodiment of the Protestant Ethic.

Other essays concern THE NEW YORKER, sociobiology, and realistic novels.The volume is an exuberant display of writerly descriptions.

If this be patriotism, make the most of it
The title implies that this is a book centered on the standard practice for college-age coupling these days--hooking up--and the first essay does focus on this bizarre state of affairs. From there, however, Wolfe expands his survey to an all-encompassing assessment of life at the dawn of the 21st century, stressing technology and computers, but also featuring the arts, media, politics, and most significantly, the intellect.

Altogether, Wolfe paints a dazzling picture of America in the year 2000, filled with our cultural contradictions and the kind of decadence that we see everyday, but also with truly mesmerizing stories of great men and their creations that will doubtless serve as the driving force for centuries to come. Stories of Bob Noyce, Émile Zola, Edward O. Wilson, and Frederick Hart, all resonate beyond Wolfe's castigation of modern intellectuals, John Updike, Norman Mailer, John Irving, Richard Dawkins, and Noam Chomsky.

The fascinating thing about Wolfe is that he recognizes the absurdity in our modern culture--perhaps with clearer vision than any other commentator of the day--and yet he remains energetically optimistic. It would seem an irrational optimism given all Wolfe has been through, but his writing is too sharp and ideas too insightful to chalk it up to psychosis.

Granted, this is a very pre-9/11 book, and Wolfe's confident tone almost begs the kind of debacle that ensued, but the soul of this work stands today untarnished. Perhaps it is even stronger than when it was first published. Because after America's critics have all been given so much vindication, after they have been crowned victorious in the battle over whether America is the great productive powerhouse or the terrible corrupt gutter, there still remains the question of what America truly stands for. And Wolfe identifies it unabashedly in this book: America stands for innovation, belief, strength, freedom, and even intellect.

At the start of this book Wolfe claims that the year 2000 will have been the transition between the first American century and the second of perhaps ten American centuries that will house the great Pax Americana. After the first eight years of this century, one might readily doubt that the 21st century will be another American century at all. But that will only be so if we let go of the energy that makes America what it is--energy that is pulsating out of this book. ... Read more

Product Description
General Books publication date: 2009Original publication date: 1987Original Publisher: National AcademiesOriginal Identifier: NAP:11532Notes: This is an OCR reprint of the original rare book. There may be typos or missing text and there are no illustrations.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.Amazon.com Review
After Tom Wolfe defined the '60s in The Electric Kool-Aid AcidTest and Radical Chic andMau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and the cultural U-turn at theturn of the '80s in TheRight Stuff, nobody thought he could ever top himselfagain. In 1987, when The Bonfire of the Vanities arrived, theliterati called Wolfe an "aging enfant terrible."

He wasn't aging; he was growing up. Bonfire's pyrotechnicsatire of 1980s New York wasn't just Wolfe's best book, it was thebest bestselling fiction debut of the decade, a miraculously realisticstudy of an unbelievably status-mad society, from the fiery combatantsof the South Bronx to the bubbling scum at the top of WallStreet. Sherman McCoy, a farcically arrogant investment banker (dubbeda "Master of the Universe," Wolfe's brilliant metaphorical co-optingof a then-important toy for boys), hits a black guy in the Bronx withhis Mercedes and runs--right into a nightmare peopled by viciousmistresses, thin wives like "social x-rays," slime-bag politicos,tabloid hacks, and Dantesque denizens of the "justice" system. If theCoen and Marx brothers together dramatized The Great Gatsby,Wolfe's Bonfire would probably be funnier. Many think hissecond novel, A Man inFull, is deeper, but Bonfire will never die down.

You might find it interesting to compare the film The Bonfire of theVanities, a fascinating calamity perpetrated by the geniusesBrian De Palma and Tom Hanks, with The Right Stuff,one of the very best films of the '80s. --Tim Appelo ... Read more

Customer Reviews (181)

One star for the General Books LLC version
My one star review is for the General Books LLC version and relates to the low quality of the publication. Check the publisher of the version you're buying before you place your order.

General Books LLC created this book using automated OCR scanning. There are numerous typos and there may be missing pages. There's absolutely no editing done (the publishers website states this clearly). Overall, very poor quality at a higher priced than much better imprints from genuine publishers that actually edit their books. (Incicentally, the version you see when you "Look Inside" is from another publishers printing of this book).

Unfortunately, General Books LLC is flooding Amazon with these low quality imprints. You've been warned.

Classic Masterpiece
Read or re-read this page-turner, novel of the complex ethnic and social structure of New York City, before the Wall Street bubble, and the reader becomes enthralled with the storyline. The different worlds of this city explode - the high life of a married Wall Street bond trader and some battle-ready residents of Harlem intercept - when the Wall Street broker's expensive Mercedes, bearing his mistress, literally collides with a young, Harlem resident. Tom Wolfe is a master of delivering the inner most thought that motivate the ambitions of those who have arrived and "those who wish to" in this superb tale about New York City. THE BONFIRES OF THE VANITIES is a classic masterpiece.

Master of the Universe
Sherman McCoy, a 39 year-old white Wall Street bond salesman, self described "Master of the Universe" lives on Park Avenue, he is married with a daughter and is a member of high society. He also has a hot chick on-the-side Maria. On their way home one Tuesday night they make a wrong turn and end up in an abandoned seedy side of the Bronx. Two black guys walking down the street offer their assistance "Hey buddy, you need some help?", Sherman and Maria sure they're being set-up, panic and end up bumping into one of them with Sherman's Mercedes and then speed away without reporting it. It all blows up when one of the black guys turns out to be severely injured and the press, police and the mayor get involved in political issues involving race and class. The writing is so great that even in 2010 a story that was written 20 years ago still seems fresh and relevant. Kudos big time!

Capturing the Contradictions and Greed of '80's New York
It took me more than a few years to read this book because I had to remove the image of Tom Hanks in the lead role from my mind (done after the first 50 pages). Let it be stated that I love fiction set in New York and the 1980's is a fascinating decade worthy of examination (and post-rationalization). The interlocking story is so well known now that I will not reprise it in this review. Suffice it to say that this is a tale of greed, morality, ego, "classes", and lost values. Wolfe walks and drives us all over New York and it is a dizzying and fun trip.

What's the Point?
Prior to actually reading it, my understanding of Bonfire was that it's one of those "must reads" for any self proclaimed American bibliophile because it is a landmark piece of cultural satire.Now that I've read it I can say that in no way does this book live up to ANY of its hype.
Although this is not the first time this has happened, it never ceases to irritate me when I walk away from a book with no actual "walk aways", ie, "what a GREAT story!" or "did not see that twist coming", or "I need a moment alone...those sex scenes were ridiculous!"After finish Bonfire, my only thought was, "ok, so what?"The story takes place in NYC circa the 80's.The focal character is a quintessential, self made yuppie, Wall Street bonds trader whose life comes crumbling down after he's involved in an unfortunate late night encounter in the Bronx, apparently the borough from hell during this decade.What ensues is a strange smattering of social clichés with little cultural context (I would've loved more references to the political and pop culture landscapes of the time) and zero character development.I suppose you could draw some parallels with greed of Wall Street then to the all out corruption of Wall Street today but when the author seemingly has no opinion about it, there is nothing the reader can do with it.
In short, this is 685 pages you could be spending elsewhere. ... Read more

Product Description

Kesey's theatrical metamorphosis from the distinguished author of One Flew over the Cuckoo'sNest to the abominable shaman of the "Acid Test" soirees thatlaunched TheGrateful Dead required Wolfe's Day-Glo prose account to endure(though Kesey's own musings in Demon Box are noslouch either). Even now, Wolfe's book gives what Wolfe clearly gotfrom Kesey: a contact high. --Tim Appelo ... Read more

Customer Reviews (152)

Book review
I enjoy Tom Wolfe as a writer. This book was popular in the '60's as a youth culture statement. Ken Kesey was an iconic figure of the era.

Necessary disillusion
A college classmate of mine in the 1960s dropped out in mid-freshman year, married another classmate; they traveled by motorcycle from Vermont to San Francisco and lived in the Haight-Ashbury. After a couple of years, they returned from San Francisco. I was never able to get my feet on the ground in conversation with my ex-classmate -- he was dripping with hippie mystery as if San Francisco existed in a completely different reality. Tom Wolfe's account got my feet on the ground. My friend did NOT want to talk about this book! Thank you, thank you, Tom Wolfe!

Disjointed, meandering and uninteresting
There is no plot or development.There is no structure.Its just a random (completely uninteresting) story about extraordinarily stoned, unwashed self-absorbed people with no direction or substance.

I've made it to page 150, and cannot force myself to read another word.

Timeless Classic
I read this in '79. I had no idea what it was about but saw it on a bookshelf and thought it had an interesting and cool cover. What a delightful surprise! Couldn't put it down! Wanted to read it again and must've given away my original copy years ago. Bought it again and am loving it as much the second time around. Too bad it's not a movie. FYI, one of the main characters, did in fact write a book that became a famous movie - "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" (also a great book). Carry on all ye Merry Pranksters out there!

Excellent ride!
Tom Wolfe, although most definitely a square himself, does an excellent job of capturing Kesey and the Prankster's quest to find spirituality though drugs.The ride is entertaining, and the writing style is creating and interesting.

I assume the material is somewhat polarizing, but if you're interested in learning more about Kesey, this has to be the best collection of information about his life.

The question is, are you on or off the bus? ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (17)

Unpersuasive and disorganized
These are disorganized and scattered essays. The first essay is about wealthy New Yorkers who support controversial causes as the stylish thing to do. The second is about the structure of the poverty program and how it encourages violence. I wasn't convinced by either essay, and I didn't enjoy the writing.

Quintessential Wolfe
Wolfe is, admittedly, an aquired taste.In this early novel, the author explores race relations during the sixties between blacks and upper class whites in the toniest of New York's neighborhoods.With a flair for verbal word games, this slim volume explores the other side of the Electric Koolaide Acid Test, by pitting well-known black activists against the social movers and shakers of the day, and, in doing so, exposes the false bravado on both sides.This book is a must-have for Wolfe fans.

Right On!
You know, the more I read him, the more I am convinced that Tom Wolfe is the world's greatest living writer. In fact I'm getting to the stage that if he wrote out his back shopping lists and released it on Amazon I'd probably buy it. Is Radical Chic the greatest work under about 60pages in the English language? You'll never think of Leonard Bernsteen (Bern - stein!) again without smirking.......

Funny funnyand highly enjoyable
I read this years ago and rereading it now I am reminded of what a hilariously funny writer Wolfe is.Wolfe 's description of the super- in-radical chiccrowd as they patronize and entertain the guntoting Black Panthers is ferociously clever.Wolfe analyzes what he calls 'nostalgie de boue' the 'nostalgia for the mud' and gives a brief course in the history of High Society in America. The old money always holds its nose as the new money until it it is replaced by it.
Wolfe is especially funny when he takes off on accents. Here is a small sample," Otto Preminger speaks up from the sofa where he's sitting, also just a couple of feet from (Black Panther) Cox. "He used one important word" then he looks at Cox'"you said zis is de most repressive country in de world. I don't beleef zat"
Wolfe gives us a blow- by - blow account of the famous party at the Bernstein's residence.He also tells of the aftemath when Charlotte Curtis gives her New York Times Report and the radical chiccrowd is astonished to find themselves abandoned by the key institution of American liberalism, the 'New York Times Editorial Page'.
In the second essay Wolfe goes to the West Coast and describes the white liberal establishment encountering the newly militant minorities angered at the bureaucracy of the poverty program.
This is a funny funny and highly enjoyable book.

Fiction and Journalism
The cringing white liberal and the self-serving bureaucrat, the sychophantic Jewish silver-spoon socialist and the cunning black race-baiting political opportunist -- these are the types of characters that Tom Wolfe elucidates with wicked satire in his stories, which are a titillating admixture of acid fiction and scathing journalism. The types in this book, moreover, seem to be a fixture of the contemorary world, and their elucidation by Wolfe amounts to a humorous education in past forms. One cannot help but note that militant Islam receives the same perverted reception from several quarters as did the likes of the Black Panther movement of yore. ... Read more

Product Description
Legend has it that the forest of the world are inhabited by elusive creatures known as "Wood Spirits." Tom Wolfe finds them everywhere and brings them to life in this delightful new instructional book. Using found wood such as driftwood, roots, and old beams from dilapidated barns, he leads the reader through the carving of wondrous, fanciful faces, that are both enchanting and beautiful. On a smaller scale, Tom also finds the Wood Spirits in walking sticks, creating treasures that are handsome and functional at the same time. Tom has been carving these Spirits for years, and they are constantly in demand. Now he leads the carver, step-by-step, through their creation, each step illustrated in beautiful color photographs. An extensive gallery is included, jam-packed with examples and ideas for the reader's own work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Nice Book for Large and Small Projects
I liked this book quite a lot.As a beginner it showed me both hand carving and mallet techniques...which I was not expecting.Also a wide variety of knives and gouges are shown, so you get an understanding of when to use which type.

Tom Wolfe Carves Wood Spirits
Loved the beauty in this full color, highly instructive book.I bought 4 books to get me into carving the wood spirits of my German ancestors, and this was the most instructive by far.I feel I can really make a carving on my own now.

Tom Wolfe carves woodspirits
Tom Wolfe is an old school master with gift of putting out great and informative books, this is one of them.

Good book for the very young
The book is good for very young carvers. The pictures are great and the author does show everything. As a matter for discussion the author provides too much detail and if you need lots of detail then this book is what young starters can use effectively.

Hoped for more
Although it does cover the subject and offer examples for inspiration, it does so in very broad strokes. I had hoped for mre istruction and less inspiration. ... Read more

Product Description
15th Printing 1988 ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (4)

Good and Mediocre Short Stories
Noted author Wolfe wrote this series of short stories in the mid 60s which describe a changing America, leaving the European framework of class structure and elegance for something different.Something that would evolve in our country even to today where people cared less about systems of status.It was a fascinating period which Wolfe identified and captured earlier that most social observers.

But, the stories are widely diverse from a group of surfers in La Jolla who have no desire to hold normal jobs, to Hugh Hefner's "nose thumbing" to sexual society, to new work habits of young adults living in London.And this is some of the problems with the book.You may like some stories but they are so diverse, you may loathe others.I find myself revisiting Wolfe's books as they provide expert commentary of the past 40 years.This one I found to be uneven but still enjoyable.

Good set of essays; not Wolfe's best
Tom Wolfe pursues the idea that many Americans and Brits since World War II have been checking out of mainstream status competition in favor of pursuing status within distinct subcultures. This plays out in some interesting ways--most notably Wolfe watches Natalie Wood pursue status in a more traditional way by acquiring knowledge of art and even some Old Masters, while others play their own status game around photographing celebrities, in this case Wood herself. Essays on Hugh Hefner, California surf culture, and London mods are also worthwhile, as is a comic piece on Wolfe's misadventures with an "automated hotel". Wolfe does bog down at times, however, in the minute stylistic details of the groups he covers; if you are not that interested in style in and of itself, your eyes may glaze over those passages. Still, this is a good read for anyone interested in subcultures (especially of the 1960s) and status-seeking.

"The Pump House Gang" story only:Close but no cigar.
Because I grew up in La Jolla, and graduated from La Jolla High School, class of 1962, I was only interested in the short story: "The Pump House Gang."

I know most of the characters in the story, and believethat Wolfe did a good job describing them.His account of the La Jollansvisiting the Watts Riots was right on.I visited the riot zone myself, andenjoyed the same experiences asShine, Nelander, and Sterncorb.

Wolfecame as close as any "outsider" has been able to do, in analyzingthe La Jolla nut house, the institution where the walls fell down, and noneof the inmates left.

A social critic a la carte
Tom Wolfe is brilliant in capturing a generation's feel. This collection of short stories describes the socialites, the freaks and the trend-setters. Wolfe's language manages to show the physical as well as theatmosphere within a few short sentences. If you liked his wit in "TheElectric Cool-Aid Acid Test" and his observations (social x-rays) in"Bonfire of the Vaities," you will love this collection of socialcritical essays. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Why Tom Wolfe?
He is insightful and incisive. He notes and cuts away the nonessential to reveal the underlying...nothingness of the 1970s.
"The Man Who Always Peaked Too Soon" is brilliant. Great drawings..and mini-essays.

Check it out -- large format hardback, 1980 printing by Farrar Strauss and GirouxIn Our Time

Tom Wolfe cartoons and essays
If you've never seen a cartoon by Tom Wolfe, it's a surprise and a real pleasure to see that he draws as brilliantly as he writes.

In Our Time has 89 of his cartoons (and a couple essays).You'll want to save it and look at the cartoons every couple of years -- "The Maternal Instinct," say, or "No. 1 The Modern Churchman," or maybe "The Man Who Always Peaked Too Soon," or the cartoon of a hugely fat Edward Kennedy wearing a tiny bathing suit, with a roach clip, a sacred heart locket, a coke spoon and a crucifix, each one dangling in his chest hairs, on its own separate chain.

You'll have your own favorites. Possibly the two cartoons about Jimmy Carter. They're especially sweet.

The Writings and Drawings of Tom Wolfe
"In Our Time" examines, through essays and sketches, thefluxtuating cultural norms of 1970's America. It is a sort of logicalliterary culmination of Wolfe's "Me decade" works: Theonservations of "Radical Chic," "Mauve Gloves andMadmen," and even bits of "The Painted Word" resonate inthis more succinct and cutting collection.The "Me Decade"spawned countless small groups of so-called free thinkers, self-healers,and folks liberating themselves from the brutal tyranny of the worlds mostprosperous economy. In "In Our Time," Wolfe is most interestedwith these people, whether they be the newly prosperous prole tearing upthe roadways in monstrous autos, the bell-bottomed middle manager smokingmarijuana during the lunch hour, or the literary, artistic, and politicalelements who fashioned themselves in response to wanton secularity. Inaddition to short essays, some pulled directly from his earlier books,Wolfe compiles and adds to his earlier drawings. These are wonderful to seein a large format, where Wolfe's rough, yet funny and insightfulobservations on the human body (specifically an American one) become allthe better to revel in. Wolfe wonderfully expresses the basic silliness offashion consciousness in the 1970's through sketches of hopefully hipseptegenerians and young punks as dandies. In addition, the short essays,especially the opening comments on the end of the decade, are vintageWolfe. Unfortunately, this edition is out of print and hard to find.However, it is the coffee table accesory for any fan of Wolfe or of thatbitter pill of a decade we call the 1970's.

The Writings and Drawings of Tom Wolfe
"In Our Time" examines, through essays and sketches, thefluxtuating cultural norms of 1970's America. It is a sort of logicalliterary culmination of Wolfe's "Me decade" works: Theonservations of "Radical Chic," "Mauve Gloves andMadmen," and even bits of "The Painted Word" resonate inthis more succinct and cutting collection.The "Me Decade"spawned countless small groups of so-called free thinkers, self-healers,and folks liberating themselves from the brutal tyranny of the worlds mostprosperous economy. In "In Our Time," Wolfe is most interestedwith these people, whether they be the newly prosperous prole tearing upthe roadways in monstrous autos, the bell-bottomed middle manager smokingmarijuana during the lunch hour, or the literary, artistic, and politicalelements who fashioned themselves in response to wanton secularity. Inaddition to short essays, some pulled directly from his earlier books,Wolfe compiles and adds to his earlier drawings. These are wonderful to seein a large format, where Wolfe's rough, yet funny and insightfulobservations on the human body (specifically an American one) become allthe better to revel in. Wolfe wonderfully expresses the basic silliness offashion consciousness in the 1970's through sketches of hopefully hipseptegenerians and young punks as dandies. In addition, the short essays,especially the opening comments on the end of the decade, are vintageWolfe. Unfortunately, this edition is out of print and hard to find.However, it is the coffee table accesory for any fan of Wolfe or of thatbitter pill of a decade we call the 1970's. ... Read more

Product Description
First Printing 1979 ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great book at breat price
After my mother saw the movie, she wanted more so I bought her the book which I had read before. ... Read more

Product Description
In this book Tom Wolfe traces the roots of the modern architectural movement and suggests ideas for its future. He asks why we have not got the architecture we deserve, and launches an attack on the hideous follies of modern architecture. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (40)

Just fine.
A good book for anyone to read. Book is clean and new as advertised, arrived promptly.

An unpersuasive polemic
Nearly thirty years ago, Tom Wolfe put the architectural world in a tizzy when he published this essay attacking modern architecture.

Now, I'm not a big fan of glass & steel & concrete office buildings, but Wolfe is absolutely virulent on the subject. And therein lies the rub.He detests Bauhaus-inspired work so much that he has no perspective.He is guilty of the same pretentiousness and arrogance of which he accuses the architects whom he dislikes.

There is a great deal to be said against architects who prefer form over function, theory over practice. But any legitimate criticism is lost in this diatribe. Saying over and over again "it's ugly and I don't like the architects' politics" is not particularly persuasive.

The architecture book you didn't know you must read
If you're an architecture student, this is the missing book. If you're just interested in architecture and how our built world ended up the way it has, this might go far toward showing you the almost accidental series of events which lead us to the 'Glass Box'.

This is satire at its very best.

Less is more... less is a bore.
Tom Wolfe is the greatest!!!! This is a hilarious inside view into the world of architecture.

Informative and interesting
This is an amusing, long essay about the rise of Bauhaus architecture. Wolfe adopts a sarcastic tone and challenges the "glass box" style of architecture. I found this to be very informative and interesting. ... Read more

Product Description
One of the exponents of new journalism, Wolfe's bestknown works include The Electric KoolAid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities.

This title, Tom Wolfe, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Views series, examines the major works of Tom Wolfe through full-length critical essays by expert literary critics. In addition, this title features a short biography on Tom Wolfe, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. ... Read more

Product Description
These ancient creatures from folklore have captured the modern imagination, including Tom Wolfe's. In this book he brings his creativity and skill to the task of creating a whole community of gnomes, bringing them to life from a block of wood. With each step illustrated in full color, Tom takes the carver cut-by-cut to a finished figure. The book includes a gallery and patterns for 5 other gnomes plus "gnome" accessories such as mushrooms and a cart. The gnomes are exciting projects, allowing the carver to add a little of his or her own creativity to the work. The step-by-step illustrations mean that even the beginning carver can end up with a gnome he or she will be proud of. In this book, Tom makes extensive use of the power carving tools that have found such widespread acceptance in the carving community. Tom uses them principally for finishing and detail work; carvers will find his techniques helpful. ... Read more

Product Description

While The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities remain perhaps his best-known works, Tom Wolfe's journalism and fiction continues to enjoy a large audience, perhaps chiefly because of the variety of his subjects and his controversial approach to them. Here, McEneaney offers an account of the man and his works, explaining along the way Wolfe's use of irony, his obsessive themes, and even his use of pranks. More comprehensive in scope than any preceding book on Wolfe, it offers accurate and accessible commentary based upon what Wolfe admits about his own work.

In this new book, Wolfe's work is put in journalistic and literary context. The reliability of Wolfe's journalism is discussed, especially when there are alternative narrations to events he has depicted. McEneaney also examines the Wolfe's use of pranks that he plays on readers at times, and uncovers the influences on Wolfe that have contributed to his unique style. Finally, the author discusses Wolfe's impact on other writers. Readers will gain access into Wolfe's world through this detailed and colorful work.

Customer Reviews (2)

Marvelous and Unique Book on Tom Wolfe
Kevin McEneaney's book Tom Wolfe's America: Heroes, Pranksters and Fools,is a marvelous and unique work. It is a must read not just for fans of the novels and non-fiction essays of the subject of the work, Tom Wolfe ( perhaps most famous for his novels The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and Bonfire of the Vanities), but for anyone interested in American pop culture and society, from the era of the early 1960s to the 1990s and present day.

What makes McEneaney's work so special is that he, like Wolfe himself, is well versed in a myriad of subjects from both so- called "high" and "low", or popular culture, and his writing effervescently mixes them up in a cocktail that is very easily consumed .Most books of literary criticism these days are written by college professors and can almost solely be appreciated by graduate students or those who have extensively read and studied the topics dissected.Similarly, articles on music or popular culture in Rolling Stoneor Mojo , or politics or history such as found in both right- wing and left- wing publications or blogs, may be in varying degrees entertaining or informative on the subject matter, (depending on the author's writing skills and knowledge of the subject at hand), but it's not too often that you can readsomething that compares , for example,the antics of Ken Kesey andthe 16th century English poem "The Fairie Queen"!McEneaney is as familiar with Muddy Waters as he is with Shakespeare, and like Wolfe, does not make any judgments on the superiority or respective merits of either, but effectively shows the relation between seemingly widely differentart forms and eras. His knowledge and grasp of history, literature, philosophy, rock and roll , art, and television programs, to name only a few topics, is simply staggering.

Wolfe's progression from a Virginia gentleman who studies fiction, journalism, American popular culture, and history,first at William and Mary College in Virginia, then in graduate school at Yale ( but the latter not prior to being a professional baseball player for a year!),to a journalist in the "Mad Men"New York of the early 1960's, is well researched.Like his contemporary and similar journalistic innovator Hunter Thompson, Wolfe started his career as a journalist at a time when such persons were much more widely read and influential of popular tastes than our television and viral age. Wolfe's articles on New York disc jockey Murray the K (the "Fifth Beatle"), and Phil Spector ("The First Tycoon of Teen) anticipated the whole rock journalism genre. McEneaney's description of Wolfe's writing on the counterculture movement of themid- 1960s that originated in the West Coast with Ken Keseythe Merry Pranksters and others, andwhere the Grateful Dead was, as he puts it , " the house band of the counterculture" shows Wolfe's pivotal role in bringing this movement into the awareness of the American mainstream. By the early 1970s, the excesses of the era ( and Wolfe, unlike gonzo Hunter Thompson, only observed the goings on and did not really inhale), turned Wolfe to become much more of a social conservative.McEneaney aptly depicts the social climate of theNew York literary and cultural establishment, headed by men such as Leonard Bernstein and William Shawn of the New Yorker,and how Wolfe brilliantly lampooned these limousine liberals inworks such asRadical Chic &Mau -Mauing the Flak Catchers. This is all the more interesting because McEneaney clearly has a much more left-wing viewpoint than Wolfe, and does not shy away from pointing out where he thinks Wolfe has his facts wrong or is misguided, but differences in political perspectives clearly do not lessen his admiration for someone whom he thinks is a modern day Mark Twain and one of our most important living writers.

Discover Tom Wolfe
Reading Tom Wolfe's America, I discovered a thoroughly entertaining comprehensive illumination of the man and his times.
Mr. McEneaney dazzled me by his use of detail and vocabulary.Easily the most accessibly erudite text I've ever encountered.
He approaches his subject from all angles with a clarity of perception that amuses and surprises.Highly enjoyable. ... Read more

Product Description
This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: The Bonfire of the Vanities, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Back to Blood, a Man in Full. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1987 novel by Tom Wolfe. The story is a drama about ambition, racism, social class, politics, and greed in 1980s New York City and centers on four main characters: WASP bond trader Sherman McCoy, Jewish Assistant District Attorney Larry Kramer, British expatriate journalist Peter Fallow and black activist Reverend Reginald Bacon. The novel was originally a serial in the style of Charles Dickens' writings; it ran in 27 installments in Rolling Stone starting in 1984. Wolfe heavily revised it before it was published in book form. The novel was a bestseller and a phenomenal success, even in comparison with Wolfe's other books. The title is a reference to the historical Bonfire of the Vanities, which happened in 1497 in Florence, Italy when the city was under the rule of the Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola. The book's title is apparently a reference to the vanities of New York society of the 1980s and appears to also be influenced by Ecclesiastes. The phrase 'vanity of vanities, all is vanity' is from Ecclesiastes. Both Ecclesiastes and The Bonfire of the Vanites have similar themes involving the lack of control anyone has over their lives regardless of their wealth, wisdom or success. Tom Wolfe wrote in 1968, "For of all I have ever seen or learned, this book seems to me the noblest, the wisest, and the most powerful expression of mans life upon this earth and also the highest flower of poetry, eloquence, and truth. I am not given to dogmatic judgments in the matter of literary creation, but if I had to make one I could say that Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=498885 ... Read more