More social commentary on casual sex among college students.

This made me laugh out loud a number of times while listening - with Tom Wolfe himself reading. I am not as familiar with Wolfe as I should be. I will make sure that changes soon. This seemingly random collection of shorts is all over the map, from teen angst to genetics/neuroscience and the invention on Silicon Valley. A reporter at heart, Wolfe's satire is engaging.

Oh my gooooooddd this book was boring. Please be forewarned - this book has nothing to do with delving further into societal rituals, like dating in the 2000s, as the title "Hooking Up" might imply. This book is a mishmash of dry essays on the evolution of technology, a silly short story (there was a reason it was cut out of A Man in Full, like how deleted scene extras on a DVD always kinda suck), and then a section on his literary wars with famous authors and The New Yorker. I remember liking his fiction, I should probably stick to that.

This is very well written, and I feel like it might have been more relevant in 2000 than it is in 2020. But I just couldn't get into the "get off my lawn"-ness of it.

The birth of Silicon Valley is particularly entertaining.

In which Tom Wolfe at his most son of a bitch purposely misreads modern culture to promote himself as the smartest man in the US. He tells us that an intellectual is someone who is an expert in one thing, but only talks about other things. His PhD is in American Studies, but certainly that gives him the expertise to talk about cognitive neuroscience, biology, and sociology.

Like a lot of reactionary scholars, he doesn't understand much about post-structuralism, so he attacks the version of it he's created in his head.

wow, who knew that tom wolfe was so stupid? among things he completely misunderstands within these essays are: marxism (numerous times), nietzche, des cartes, judith butler, susan sontag, marshal mcluhan, noam chomsky, richard dawkins and memes, the bell curve, and basic linguistic development of slang (as well as completely wrongheaded use and appropriation of that slang). there was a time when wolfe was a very good journalist (before the '80s), and there was a time when wolfe was a very good novelist (for exactly one novel in the '80s) but this collection makes it clear to me that his talents have very severely atrophied; his detached and narrow view of society (---he makes the point multiple times that there is no more working class in the United States because even plumbers can have third wives and plan for vacations in the Caribbean...) has rendered any sort of the naturalism that he pretends to completely and utterly meaningless. i am stupider for having read this book.

Extremely enjoyable collection of later Wolfe essays, as well as a novella. The only essays not "recent" were first published in the mid 1960s, which involve his satirical take on The New Yorker. Particularly liked the essay dealing with the origin of Silicone Valley.

I "read" this book on audio... over, and over, and over again because it is very, very, very good. My favorite portion of "Hooking Up" describes the men who invented the transistor and the microchip. But this book relays many more anecdotes and editorials.

In the prologues, Tom Wolfe talks about having picked up a book called "The Year 1000," and thinking about how the 2nd millennium deserved its compendium, with updates from the past 1000 years. In the main body, Tom Wolfe addresses this and that, seeming to divert his focus here and there. Some articles are long, some are short, some are too short. Once the reader reaches the end of the book, a few unifying themes have become manifest: the mores of society in the present generation and the history of their development, and the future of our mores, making mention to an apocalypse of Nietzsche's as well as gaps in scientific understanding (follow up in Tom Wolfe's latest, "The Kingdom of Speech").

The anecdotes seemed to be discursively abutted to one another, but Tom Wolfe sprinkles a few ideas and phrases throughout the book which culminate at the end, making his themes appreciably manifest.

I'm still thinking about "Two Young Men Who Went West." It has all the elements of well-done new journalism-- getting inside the heads of people, and turning what, in lesser hands, could be a very dull tale into something good. While I don't necessarily align with Wolfe's politics, and some of the essays are self-congratulatory, when he's good, he's very good.

I think the best piece in this book is the first one, a fascinating story detailing the impact of Congregationalism and the state of Iowa on the birth of Silicon Valley and really, modern corporate culture in the US. You can see the seeds of the atrociously long and out-of-touch novel I Am Charlotte Simmons in the piece called "Hooking Up," which is much better than the novel that it generated.

his was my first Wolfe anything. I had seen several of his works lying around collecting dust on friends bookshelves, and had often wondered,"Who is this man with the ostentatious covers and 90s charisma?" Turns out he is somewhat of a relic and somewhat of a genius. Like most carnal 20-somethings, I picked this one up because I was engaged by the prospect of an explanation of the process of temporary sexual desire. Instead, I got a narrative that weaved in and out of the cybertropolis of Y2K leftovers and Jerry Springer hangovers. It's not that Hooking Up is bad, in fact, it's quite good, it's just...dusty, fantastically 90s writing. Wolfe starts out strong telling the tale of Silicon Valley via a midwestern states dowsing of homespun Americana. The comparison to Josiah Grinnell, the coiner of the sternum lifting "Go West, young man," to Intel's brilliant business/physicist Robert Joyce is a tired cliche at best. Wolfe makes the argument that the success of the tech industry was based on the lingering residue of "Dissenting Protestantism" fighting against the elitist stigma of the Eastern United States. But, Wolfe's biting diction and playful tone allow for the insurgence of the technical age amidst all the limp-wrist elitists hanging around in Humanities departments (I am one by the way). For all of his modern American apparatus drum-banging, Wolfe goes wildly off base by suggesting that the "ivory tower" fields of history, sociology, english, etc. are all boiling in a stew of remnant Marxism. Come on, there's plenty of capitalism here, what with all the competing and throat crunching for some sort of subject that hasn't been written about. Ok, so the Humanities is sinking under the weight of its own libraries, but there is a freshness in the air that is moving the tweed mildew out of our crumbling marble buildings. Surprise to Wolfe, however, the movement is not flamboyant or cutting edge. Good history today is patient, human-centered, and rich in overlapping methodologies. By lumping all of the liberal arts into a block of deconstruction, Wolfe failed to see what was coming as an attache to the estrangement caused by our technical enterprise: a quest for identity. And I would argue, most emphatically, that the past has the most to say about that one. Cue: ivory tower. "Ambush at Fort Bragg" was a giant disappointment for me. It seemed like Wolfe was trying to hold some sort of pep rally for primetime journalism that no one really gave a shit about in the 90s. A whole short story about a murder of a gay person in the military by two erstwhile "skinhead" rednecks? Ughickphargh!!!! The whole plot was so Ricki Lake in the worst sort of 90s way, and still, this was to be the example of the great opportunity of current American journalism at the turn of the millenium? We got it all in "Ambush": nudey porno half asians, gay murders, big busted middle-aged female anchors, a sweaty palmed, emasculated whiner, and a giant criticism of the American military. I'll give Wolfe some credit because this was written in 2000, but I remember that year I was entranced by the emerging internet apparatus governed by Napster, AIM, and ebay. What Wolfe gave us was a last ditch pilot for the Jerry Springer show. Wolfe's other autobiography about laying out William Shawn to the triumph of the 1960s journalistic world was an equal match of tedious brazenness. Wolfe let us know full well how awesome he USED to be, back then, you know, when newspapers were cool and such, and people cared about editors. Talk about "tiny mummies," Wolfe became one as soon as he published this in Hooking Up. Sure, it's an interesting story about bringing The New Yorker to its knees, and it's actually quite funny at parts, but I don't see any real purpose in it being in this volume other than to prop Wolfe up as some bare-knuckel bad-ass with a real life typewriter! Anyways, this book is good for one reason only: Wolfe is an unbelievably good writer, and actually, he's a pretty sweet bad-ass too. Hooking Up seems to try too hard to make those points, but after all of the "Hey guys, I'm Tom Wolfe, and I'm really good, have been for awhile," one is convinced that this eccentric, pompous man, is a magician with words. So, I'll read other stuff by him-maybe even a novel, but I suppose from here on out I will be looking over my shoulder to guard against an Icabod Crane in the form of Wolfe who's lost his head because it exploded from egotism. 61 Respectable