Oh Wolfe you old creep, what new thing could I say about your prose? I love it though I also think it’s trash so yeah

I usually say I prefer Wolfe's nonfiction to his fiction (though I tend to rate his fiction higher due to it's impressive complexity), but I might have to make an exception here (this being nonfiction other than the novella). I just didn't care for this as much as "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,""The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," or " From Bauhaus to Our House." Nothing was bad, but I didn't care much for most. There was a lot where Wolfe sounded like a cranky old man, and he sometimes seemed to argue for things he'd just finished arguing against. Some of his predictions seem short sighted, and it seemed like he may have gotten conned a bit on the pervasiveness of certain things in one or two essays (to the point of a "tea shades" kind of confidence). The New Yorker bit was interesting, but I spaced out because I didn't get enough of the background in what he was ranting about. My fault on that, but I just didn't care as much for the book as I hoped I would.

Superlative use of ellipses…

Enlightening and a great all around read

I love Wolfe books. His observations are so delicious and he never fails to deliver to me the entire gluttonous buffet!

A collection of essays and one novella by Tom Wolfe, covering a wide range of topics, from art history to neurotechnology to literature. It was ok, but not great. My favorite essays were "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died" (about philosophy, religion and neurotechnology...interesting bits on Nietzche's predictions for the future after the "intellectual elite" agreed that religion was no longer a viable belief) and "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists" (interesting downloading of social structures throughout history).

The novella, a crime story about a sting operation to catch three soldiers who had committed a hate crime, started out engaging and interesting, but became tedious as the reader entered the thoughts of the protagonist more and more. Annoying, pathetic man.

I really enjoyed the other two books I've read by him: "Bonfire of the Vanities" and "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" and I have on my shelf, A Man in Full, also by Tom Wolfe. I will read it eventually, but I've had enough for now.

I enjoy Tom Wolfe's essays very much, more than his fiction so far. He's very good at illustrating points and this book felt like a reality check for what's going on in America right now. I liked his insights on novel-writing in America, as I feel he is spot-on with regards to writers not being as in touch with the world around them as people such as Steinbeck, which really detracts from their ability to connect with the reader through their works. However Henry James is still among my favorites.
I also really enjoyed Wolfe's insight on the new Darwinism of Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson. "Sorry But Your Soul Just Died" was a great essay which shows the dangers of today's uber-scientific attitude.
I really enjoyed reading his essays poking fun of "the New Yorker." I never read it but that's exactly how I imagine it to be.
This was a very entertaining read and it is very refreshing to read something conservative for a change.

Read it just for the at-the-time notorious New Yorker takedown mentioned in The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight. Worth reading if you're interested in journalism history.

An incisive and brilliant observation of American society.

great collection. the novella is so-so, but the essays are generally fantastic (not to mention thoroughly researched and delightfully reported, as wolfe's work so often is), covering a range of intermingling topics, including science and technology, art and literature, and the trend of late-century american thinking toward the absurdly refined. this last point crops up again and again and comes to fruition in "rococo marxists" and "my three stooges," where wolfe dismantles the tired dogma of post-60s american thought with what artfully comes off as little more than effortless good sense. it's seriously impressive, and unquestionably important for anyone interested in where the american scholar (or the american artist or writer, for that matter) stands today. this collection also reprints wolfe's notorious 1965 swipe at william shawn's new yorker (details: http://nymag.com/news/media/48341/ ), complete with an introduction and a postmortem to the "affair" written for this collection, which by itself justifies having this on the shelf. the only weak spot is actually the title essay, which has a few great lines but is mostly shallow, troglodyte grumbling about millennials; thankfully, it's short.

4.5 stars
Apart from everything else, it's always great fun to read a Tom Wolfe book - to metaphorically get into his jazzy white sports car and zoom off to whichever neighborhood he is careering around. In this book from 2000 those neighborhoods are eclectic: they comprise a look at sexual mores in millennial America; a history of Silicon Valley; a discussion of the ascendency of neuroscience as a tool for explaining human behavior; modern art; a novella; a biting takedown of John Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer over their negative reviews of his novel "A Man in Full"; and an odd satire from 1965 on The New Yorker.
Never a dull moment.
Much of the enjoyment in reading Wolfe comes from his exposure and ridicule of cant. (Read his marvelous books on modern art,"The Painted Word" and on architecture, "From Bauhaus to Our House" for fuller treatment of the absurdities in those fields.) In a section of the book bemoaning the passing of the great literary achievements of the first half of the 20th century and their replacements by pseudo-intellectuals and their love of theory, Wolfe quotes Susan Sontag:
"In a 1967 article for Partisan Review entitled 'What's Happening to America,' she wrote 'The white race IS the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone - its ideologies and inventions - which eradicates autonomous populations wherever it spreads. which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.'
"The white race IS the cancer of human history? Who WAS this woman? Who and what? An anthropological epidemiologist? A renowned authority on the history of cultures throughout the world, a synthesizer of the magnitude of a Max Weber, a Joachim Wach, a Sir James Frazer, an Arnold Toynbee? Actually, she was just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review. Perhaps she was exceptionally hell-bent on illustrating McLuhan's line about indignation endowing the idiot with dignity, but otherwise she was just a typical American intellectual of the post-World War II period. After all, having the faintest notion of what you were talking about was irrelevant."
Wolfe is never one to be humble about his talent, skills and accomplishments or to underestimate his perceived place in the literary pantheon. In the chapter discussing the disparagement by Mailer, Irving and Updike of his book, "A Man in Full", he writes of them that: It must gall them a bit that everyone - even them - is talking about me and no one is talking about them...'A Man in Full' frightened them. They were shaken. It was as simple as that. 'A Man in Full' was an example...of a possible, indeed, the likely new direction in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century literature: the intensely realistic novel, based on reporting, that plunges wholeheartedly into the social reality of America today, right now - a revolution... that was about to sweep the arts in America, a revolution that would soon make many prestigious artists, such as our three old novelists, appear effete and irrelevant."
So, Updike, Irving and Mailer: "effete and irrelevant." And did I mention that Wolfe titled this chapter" "My Three Stooges"?
I could go on, and I actually have to stop myself from doing so. Just remember that after a wild ride with Wolfe you'll need some time to get your balance on solid ground again.
(4.5 stars rather than 5 because the inclusion - the last 45 pp of the book - of his piece from the New York Herald Tribune in 1965 on The New Yorker and its editor-in-chief, William Shawn, was dated and tedious. I am not sure why it is here.)

This was my first foray into Wolfe, except for an abortive attempt at Bonfire of the Vanities a few Christmases ago (it wasn't bad. It just wasn't the right time). I have to say I enjoyed reading this. The essays were fun and informative, although Wolfe's perspective seems pretty crotchety. He always has his sights set on someone to skewer or lampoon. I was particularly steamed when he was skewering groups that I identify with: young people who have sex (GASP!) and Marxist intellectuals. But when he was skewering someone else, I went gleefully along for the ride with only a tinge of guilt at the fact that whoever he had in his sights probably was being equally as misjudged as I felt when reading his attacks on my life and ideas.

The conceit of the book is about connection and technology. Many of the pieces have a lovely sense of the history of ideas, and Wolfe is particularly apt at identifying a foundational hero for an idea and querying how the successors failed to grasp the genius of this great figure. Perhaps the most balanced piece in the book is the little novella "Ambush at Fort Bragg." He has a peculiar way of rendering the phonetic pronun-say-shun of southern army grunts, but the climax of the piece is riveting, and of all the studies in this book, "Ambush" makes some of the most provocative connections between technology, social mores, and human nature.

The book begins with an essay covering the fascinating rise of Silicon Valley with particular attention to its patron saint, Bob Noyce. The piece begins like a morality story, but turns to hagiography. Wolfe really wants to pin all of the greatness of the late twentieth century's technological advances on Noyce's embodiment of the apogee of midwest dissenting protestantism. But one wonders why he refuses to turn his scathing disdain for east coast high culture on the equally decadent high culture that grew out of the Silicon Valley. The essay ends with the death of Noyce and refuses to follow the threads of the decline and fall narrative that he has so bitingly crafted for the east coast elite. This is particularly puzzling given the fervor with which he lambastes the changing sexual mores of American youth in the introduction to the collection. The vagaries he descries can arise equally as well among the idle children of ultra rich absentee parents working in the tech industries as they can among east coast bankers' children.

The book ends with a whimper. The last few pieces trade an aging Wolfe's crotchetiness for a glimpse of a young Wolfe's bravado. He reprints several decades old attacks on William Shawn, then editor of the New Yorker. These essays were a bit too hammy for me. It seemed an odd way to end the collection. In fact, like many "hook ups," this collection might be characterized by it's frequent tendency to end less satisfyingly than it began.

There is a lot to like in this book, and even when I didn't like it, I couldn't stop reading it.

Το Hooking Up αν και θεωρείται χρονογράφημα, περιλαμβάνει κείμενα διαφορετικών προελεύσεων μεταξύ των οποίων ένα short story και κάποια άρθρα του Tom Wolfe.

Η θεματολογία του είναι χαοτική, κινείται από την ιστορία του Robert Noyce, του ιδρυτή της Intel και "Δήμαρχο του Sillicon Valley" μέχρι το βαρετό ύφος του New Yorker την επί William Shawn εποχή. Επί παντός επί στητού σα να λέμε και δεν αφήνει τίποτα να πέσει κάτω.

Το πρώτο μέρος του, για το Sillicon Valley, μέχρι και το "Ambush at Fort Bragg" την ιστορία του ξεσκεπάσματος ενός ρατσιστικού εγκλήματος για χάρη μιας τηλεοπτικής εκπομπής είναι φανταστικό. Το μέρος που αφορά την "κόντρα" του με το New Yorker, περνάει μάλλον αδιάφορο.

Tα επιχειρήματά του είναι λογικά και δομημένα, η έρευνά του στέρεη, το μυαλό του καθαρό, το στυλ του απαράμιλλο και ευφυές. Σαρκαστικός, οξύς και εύστοχος, ο Τom Wolfe φτιάχνει ένα χρονογράφημα που κινείται στις αρχές της τρίτης χιλιετίας αλλά και σε αρκετές δεκαετίες πριν από αυτό, καυτηριάζοντας ο,τιδήποτε του τραβάει την προσοχή με μοναδικό τρόπο.