This book was comprised of three parts that didn't really fit well together, but were individually interesting: a collection of impressively prophetic (reading them nearly twenty years later) essays about society, a novella about gotcha journalism, and a retelling and reprint of Wolfe's early battle with New Yorker editor William Shawn. The essays were the highlight of the book, and the rest felt like padding to get the page count to an acceptable number; not bad, just didn't fit. As always, Wolfe is an excellent writer, but because of how uneven this collection is, I can't recommend it as wholeheartedly as I perhaps might have otherwise.

So entertaining and whimsically written. Wolfe had an incredible way of capturing absurdity. This patchwork of recent American stories demonstrate just how things are changing.

Another Tom Wolfe masterpiece! I have run out of superlatives to describe Tom Wolfe's books!

Good compilation of Wolfe, wide range of subject matter.

Tom Wolfe is an excellent and well-known author, he writes knowledgably and very well. I just got bogged down in all the incrementals. The idea for the book was a compelling one. I am sure most people with better concentration "apps" than I now have would very much enjoy the book

Lightly related and often taking the title as an erstwhile guiding light, this collection of essays benefits from Wolfe’s writing and suffers from a little bit of quaintness as a product of its time. Sometimes it’s insightful, sometimes nearsighted, sometimes blind, but it’s never tedious or boring (arguments could be made for the New Yorker affair at the end).

The titular essay is a little weak (think ‘rainbow party panic’) but the three afterwards are very strong. The Noyce piece is a highlight for me. I like how Wolfe summarises and examines The New Yorker Style.

Wolfe could have made an excellent ‘writer writing about writing’, I think. Didn’t love the Three Stooges bit even though I am not particularly fond of the writers he was feuding with, either. Mordecai Richler summarised the publishing industry best with a mordant blurb in one of his novels.

Vonnegut would have called this a ‘blivit’. Altogether worth reading if it crosses your path, and worth looking for if you’re a big time Wolfe-head. I still really want to read Bonfire and would have much rather read that. But sometimes (always) one reads what’s at hand.

Tom Wolfe may dress up like Mark Twain, but Tom Wolfe’s a sheep in Twain’s clothing.

That said, Tom Wolfe — in n  Hooking Upn — gives a riotous performance. From Silicon Valley to the halls of the hallowed “New Yorker” Magazine, Wolfe sheds light: much-needed and much-appreciated light. There are gems in this book, but you’ve got to know how to spot them.

Wolfe’s prose is edgy, amusing, straightforward — and a joy to read. He just ain’t Twain, Huck. (But then, nobody is except Samuel Clemens himself.)

RRB
04/16/11
Brooklyn, NY, USA

(Skipped the novella, but might read it later, or not)

Great. I've never read essays or an essay collection before so it took me a while to warm up to the format, but once I got over that hurdle I found this collection to be a fascinating study of the human experience and a masterful use of the English language. Loved the "Vita Robusta, Ars Anorexica" section. And "The New Yorker Affair" section gave me a glimpse of the man who was a must-read cultural commentator and novelist/journalist.

´America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! It never lets you down!' Sorry but your soul just died /Tom Wolfe

A bunch of reheated snark from the monumentally over-rated Tom Wolfe. I've always found it bewildering how Tom Wolfe is considered a great writer. He's a great ego no doubt but I always found his stuff moderately well written at best, smug, jingoistic and verging on incomprehensible at worst. He has decent sense of observation and he was at the right place at the right time a few times, but I just don't think he's anything more than a talented self-promoter with writing skills slightly above the average journalist. He reminds me of Woody Allen in a way - weirdly identified with New York - the prevailing narrative at one time was that he is a genius and anyone who says he's not is wrong, or envious, or worse ... Then he wasn't ... I wonder if the same fate awaits Tom Wolfe?

Take Hooking Up for example. The essay that gives the book it's name is laughable in 2022. It outlines a future with a USA that is so ascendant that it exists on a plain that those backwards Europeans can only dream of. America only has one problem - elites that don't accept that America has a right to dominate the world. You get the impression that Tom Wolfe isn't exactly against the idea of elites, but feels that people look to the wrong elites - they should forget about all the troublesome, bitter college professors and "intellectuals" and look to ... him. Then there's a long, weird, spiel about how teenagers are interested in sex ... Who would have thought... It reaches it's most laughable talking about how advanced the US medical system has become that American tourists try to avoid getting sick on holidays in Europe because the treatment is so primitive... Hands up any one that would prefer to be in an American hospital compared to one in Germany, France or even the UK.

I read Hooking Up a while ago but I remember an essay on how some "popular" sculptor isn't considered a serious artist even though lots of people like him supposedly. Whose to blame ... elites! There's a long boring piece about the establishment of Intel, I think, is used as an opportunity to bash academics, and an essay about an entomologist Edward O. Wilson who's work he claims proves that people are just born to be what they are so they should stop complaining (especially those Marxists - by which he means everyone he doesn't like that has a public profile). In the Land of the Rococo Marxists Wolfe howls with rage at intellectuals that are not only "Marxist" but also - gasp - European. Then there's a so so piece of fiction that bashes journalists for daring to uncover evidence that soldiers beat to death a gay colleague. He spends a whole section attacking Mailer, Irving and Updike who dared to criticise his long, mediocre novel A Man in Full.

On and on it goes ... I gave up by the last section which appears to be a bunch of insider accounts of goings on in the media world of New York. That was more than I could cope with.

If Tom Wolfe was ever a great writer it was obviously long, long before Hooking Up was published.

Not one of my favorite Wolfe books unlike the Right Stuff he wrote back in 1979.

I heard about this book by accident when an acquaintance jokingly commented, Let’s Hook Up and found out about this Wolfe book. The title is but a tease, just like my acquaintance and not what this book is about. My guess is Wolfe wanted to sell a great number of books in 2000 so he titled the book to fill his pockets with more money. Actually, the book is more a history lesson than about Hooking Up.

Good read indeed