Rating: 
Summary: Yet Another Winner
Review: As was the case with its similarly hefty predecessor The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe's latest is a big-canvas look at American culture - focusing again on the fragility of respectability in our materialist culture, and the ruthlessness of descent once that fragile net of respectability is broken. Wolfe's main fictional characters start out in trouble and fall from there, and don't seem to have any spiritual center to help ground them and protect them from the free-fall. This book is different from Bonfire, however. Although big-canvas, nobody could call Bonfire big-hearted. While A Man in Full again showcases Wolfe's amazing satirical and observational gifts, this book is much less mean-spirited, much more compassionate and empathetic than Bonfire. The characters are less cartoonish and two-dimensional, more believable. I found the non-Sherman McCoy chapters in Bonfire somewhat tedious while I thought all of the many parallel plot lines in this book were equally interesting. In Charlie Croker's ex-wife we even have a character who seems to be on the ascendant and growing! One thing this book does share with Bonfire - it is very, very, funny. The set pieces involving the 60 year-old protagonist and his 28 year-old high-maintenance second wife are among the wittiest passages I've read. The ambition of this book is staggering - to present in an entertaining comic novel four different class strata of late 20th century American society. Wolfe has really reached for the stars, and although the book is not perfect and sputters in places it works often enough to be called great. Even The Great Gatsby, a contrast to this book in its condensed wisdom and lyrical, poetic writing, has dead spots. Like Gatsby, this book captures a period of American life better than any other novel of the era, while providing insights to life which transcend that era. As was the case with Gatsby, it shows that wisdom and humor can co-exist in an ambitious novel, and that great literature can also be great fun to read.
Rating: 
Summary: more than 700 pages of good writing
Review: This is definitely a great book. I started reading it before I moved from Europe to Atlanta 2 months ago. It gave me a clue of what to expect here. Many chapters of the book are written in "real-time". So you can exactly imagine the situation the character faces right now. Everything is written so brilliant that you can actually smell the summer in Georgia. However, the ending of the story was not what I expected - but it was definitely a lot of fun reading it.
Rating: 
Summary: Characters credible, situations not always credible,
Review: I got up each morning with Charlie CrockerHis struggles became mine, his choices not always in line with his character. The banks method to retrieve their money was based on their assumption that Atlanta would be in conflict over the possible rape. Story line fuzzy and unbelievable.
Rating:
Summary: 1999 Book of the Year
Review: The familiar, snobbish qualities of his warm yet condescending writing style perfectly match Charlie Croker's own carefully sculpted persona of haughty disdain and color. Without indulging in overwrought characterizations, Wolfe manages to create enough distinction between players to keep this sweeping epic coherent. There are moments that find him overreaching, but when voicing a novel this broad, some notes are bound to ring false. Overall, this book is an intelligent, entertaining and scrupulously detailed and bitingly funny portrait of America at the turn of the millennium.
Rating:
Summary: Great Writing; Great Ending
Review: I don't feel the need to wax philosophical and describe the book in detail like so many others have here (and did very well, I might add). I just felt as though the book was building, building, building, for 700+ pages, to something I was sure was going to be huge. Then, it was! BAM. Unbelievable. Not a waste of time, and most will probably feel "stunned."
Rating:
Summary: Why it didn't win the Pulitzer.
Review: See J. Bottum's piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday (Weekend Journal section, Apri 16) for a marvelous explanation of why, in the eyes of the style-driven writing world, Wolfe doesn't rate as a true professional. Very amusing article.
Rating:
Summary: Tough to put down
Review: A Man In Full is a good story, certainly as great as Bonfire of the Vanities. There are some flashes of Tom Wolfe's brilliance, and then the story peaks. Many of the characters seem to exude substance and the story makes them fit. Mr. Wolfe's satirical humor is woven throughout the novel. One is left with the question, does Mr. Wolfe confuse Reggie Jackson with Jessie Jackson or is his portrayal of Jessie Jackson hiting home runs intentional. I recommend the book as it is better than Bonfire.
Rating:
Summary: A Man In Full is GREAT
Review: Tom Wolfe's scanning, tunneling vision and rye humour has targeted the cultural landscape for four decades now. ' A Man in Full' cuts a broad swath through America of the 1990's. It uses the same template as his novel of a decade ago, 'Bonfire of the Vanities'. A rainbow of American success stories in progress converge into an irreconcilable destiny. Something must give and does. The motivating ideal of the protagonist here is a more primal force, however. The self made 'Southern Man', this 'noble' anachronism, as opposed to the insipid Wall Street Yuppie of Bonfire. The social forces on which the characters ride are more elemental, a clash of plate tectonics on a molten core of hubris. There's little subtlety in Wolfe's symbolisms or descriptions of the shallow pretensions in this cultural wasteland. I am keenly aware when I read Wolfe that I am not reading literature. This is sheer indulgence! This is a soap opera. Finely and skillfully wrought, no doubt, but still a social circus of over bred egos and under bred moral sense. 'A Man in Full's' characters are brought to the material abyss through pride, lust, avarice and envy. These are surface dwellers, arrivistes without an appreciation of proportion and self restraint. They seek nothing deeper or more meaningful in their lives than an escalation up another rung on the social ladder. It's hard to like most of these people but dramatic personalities of this type are not made to be likable. It can still be a little overwrought at times. There is no stasis in Tom Wolfe's work, no get along and go along. All the protagonists are gladiators in the forum, everyone has an agenda, which leads to raucous, hilarious and even heroic results when put in the context of an elegant gallery benefit, a thoroughbred stud session, or a violent prison pod. The sustaining philosophical undercurrent here is the Stoic creed of Epictetus. It is a philosophy of resolve and assertion of self dignity in the face of persecution, humiliation and defeat. It is the actualisation of this essential man which Wolfe uses as a contrast to the material and social accouterments by which Charles Croker and company have defined themselves. The episode of palpable terror and self affirmation in the prison pod is as powerful as anything written in contemporary fiction If there is a problem with this book, it's that it's finely honed characters and situations and it's excellent writing are thread together by a somewhat tenuous and implausible story line. Sometimes it seems as though Wolfe threw it together as an afterthought to frame his comic, social and character essays, of which he is the modern master. I wrestled with giving it four stars on this basis, but the compensating strengths are too compelling. I'm not sure quite what to make of the ending. As usual Wolfe ties up all the loose ends in an epilogue which can leave you wondering 'what's the point?'. To Wolfe's credit he does not provide happy endings or poetic justice. Charlie Croker and Sherman McCoy are joined at a point when their 'tragic flaws' and superficiality are becoming dimly evident even to themselves. We leave them in the detritus of their unraveled lives. The character's final dissolution is left unresolved. They seem to become aware of an inner self, though, brought to a point where they might even be developing some character. Something only they need understand. The rest of the world goes along merrily as if none of this had happened. When I finish a book like this I feel like I've been to a feast where I've indulged myself a bit too much. In 100 years Tom Wolfe will be mainly of interest to social historians, as locked as his books are to this day and age. But on the off chance that they are studying Wolfe in lit classes, 'A Man in Full' should regarded as a masterpiece of journalistic fiction.
Rating: 
Summary: WAY WAY OVER RATED
Review: Do not was your time. This is not a bad book..it just is not good. You keep reading and reading waiting for something to happen and it never does. This was a BIG let down.
Rating:
Summary: Mr. Wolfe Got Way Too "Full".
Review: Talk about a letdown. A major disappointment. Characters are larger than life yet so flawed that one winds up not liking any of them with the possible exception of Atlanta's mayor and the kid from Oakland. It's not even worth remembering their names. The storyline starts out well enough, but the last third of the book read like the author got to a point in the plot that he realized he did'nt possess a clue as to how to end it sensibly. The "new age" awareness that our boy Croker falls into seemed to be a total cop-out. I got the feeling Wolfe wrote all but the last 100 pages and then decided "I've got one hour to finish this thing". Way too much description of what people were wearing, the food they ate, and on and on. This kind of book leaves we wondering if others who raved about this were reading the same piece of literature I suffered through. Better luck next time.
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