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Summary: Great sociological commentary for our times.
Review: Couldn't lay this book down for complete fascination with all the characters. Particularly interesting was his characterization of us Okies (as subhuman)and us older women, showing that there is plenty of injustice and discrimination for many members of society. Agreeing with many other readers, the conclusion was weak.
Rating: 
Summary: Painfully disappointing, so close and yet......
Review: I am a seventh generation Southerner and have lived in Atlanta most of the last thirty years. Wolf did capture the "feel" of the "new South", and there were some very memorable scenes. But somehow, it all never quite worked. Thirty pages from the finish, heading into the home stretch, I thought "wow", this is going to be incredible. And then it just rolled over and died! Very disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: Love Him Love Him Love Him
Review: Readers beware! In the age of clintonian political correctness, Wolfe, sticks his finger in the collective eye.Ask any reviewer...Are you black? Are you a democrat? Are you from the south? If the answer to any of the above is yes, disregard ANYTHING they say about Wolfe and A Man in Full. I savored each page. Angry when the ride was over.
Rating: 
Summary: Was Tom Wolfe paid by the word?
Review: Thank goodness I bought this book at a discount store (my apology to Amazon.com). I started to read it while keeping my wife company as she lay in a hospital bed...I was soon in more pain than she was. Wordy, wordy, wordy,blah, blah, blah. Not very much to say with so very many words. The pages flew by as I skipped page after page of boredom. I finally put it down, after 300+ pages and won't pick it up again. I started reading a book my almost 9 year old daughter was reading, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone", and it was far more enjoyable, interesting, and well written. I recommend "Harry...". Pass on Tom's tome.
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Summary: Swiftian satire light, dark, and very dark.
Review: Like his earlier novel, "Bonfire of the Vanities," Tom Wolfe's latest, "A Man in Full," is a satire in full, moving from social criticism of targets in Atlanta to a darker and deeper moral satire. Sharp observations of society--the race to the top, the women like "boys with breasts," and the obsessive chase toward money and power, dominate the first of the novel's four stages. Here the chief character, and indeed the chief go-getter, is Charlie Croker, a man whose great physical size indicates the size of his wealth and his power. With his raunchy jokes and his love of self-display, he is the Falstaff of the Old South. Ironically, his progress is toward decline and disaster. Meanwhile a young man with nothing but his principles and a fine talent for courting his own disasters becomes Charlie's counterpart, although they do not meet until very near the novel's end, in a meeting reminiscent of that between Odysseus and Telemachus or between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. The center of the book presents--as "Bonfire of the Vanities" did--a racial problem that threatens the structure of the whole city. Here the satire turns toward the ambiguities in attempts to maintain political correctness that conflicts with inclinations: for example, when Charlie meets a Jew named Herbert, he greets him as "Hebe--I mean Herb." Eventually, the young counterpart of Charlie Croker experiences a series of frustrations and violent attacks, culminating in his imprisonment where frustration and violence turn into operatic extremes. It is in this section that the brutality and bestiality of the inmates resonate as the understory of human behavior, and the satire begins to darken into an apocalypse that reveals the primitive impulses that lie beneath "civilized" behavior and that in certain circumstances emerge to do their worst. The prison episodes evoke the passages in Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" where the bestial human beings--the Yahoos--are not recognized by the naive Gulliver. Swift's view of mankind was bleak indeed; but then so is Wolfe's.
Rating:
Summary: Tom Wolf has never written a bad book and this one is great.
Review: I'll be honest with you, I haven't always loved 'everything' Tom Wolfe has written, but I never read one of his books that I didn't like a lot. After reading a couple of press reviews, including RS, of 'A Man In Full' I was convinced and ordered it. I really enjoyed the story, the characters and the tight writing style. Not as exciting as Steiger's thriller, Alien Rapture, but an excellent read never-the-less. I've read thirty books from amazon this year and can recommend; Blood Work by Connelly, Cobra Event by Preston (Hot Zone), and best of all, Alien Rapture by Brad Steiger. All excellent reading written by the best.
Rating: 
Summary: A big ol' Peyton Place bore
Review: What a joke! Caricature's, stereotypes, high drama and an ending written with an obvious sequel in mind. Is this what all the hype is about? Not only are the women cartoon characters but so are the men. My first Tom Wolfe novel and probably my last. All the hullabaloo and I'm thinking, great, a well written, intense, maybe even profound novel. Perfect! What a mistake. The characters have no dimension whatsoever, there are no surprises and I finished this book and thought, what a rip! I'm surprised Oprah hasn't put this one on her book list. All those kudos and I'll never know why. John Updike and Norman Mailor have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO FEAR!
Rating:
Summary: A big disappointment.
Review: This book was a big disappointment. Tom Wolfe spent 700 plus pages weaving a story and describing characters and places with overblown detail only to abuptly wind it up and end it extremely implausably in about 25 pages. Don't waste you time or money on it.
Rating:
Summary: Superb!
Review: I roared through the whole thing. Wolfe has managed to strip bare the true essence of human foibles. Congrats, Wolfe!!!! A true masterpiece. Your best to date. You can't possibly top this one.
Rating:
Summary: disappointingly flat and limited
Review: I laughed all the way through Bonfire, but had only an occassional chuckle with A Man in Full. Only two characters develop, and only because Wolfe needs a story line. I hope I missed most of the jokes because I know the northeast well and have little experience with Atlanta. If this is true,it is a novel someone else would enjoy. However, it also means that Wolfe is not writing literature for all times, but local fiction about a particular era. (Better to read John Irving's Widow for One Year: it's full of unlikeable characters, but they're real and one cares about them.)
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