Rating: 
Summary: out of his league
Review: anything written by John Updike, Norman Mailer, or John Irving is better than anything by tom wolfe. That's all I have to say.
Rating: 
Summary: Age and riches have dulled Wolfe or "Whaaaat??"
Review: This is a fun book, but it is silly and not at all topical. Much like a Spielburg movie, it has a certain "genius", or at least newspaper pundit/critic types from even the best of mid-brow (i.e., New York times) laud it and call it "genius". So be it, but TW is plowing the same furrow. He has become, like the post-modern culture he hates so, a pastiche of himself (and one might note, this is at his best). At his worst, and this includes the (apparently notoriously) horrid ending(s), he has degenerated into a parody of himself. But this does not, rather like the popular stupidity/genius of Spielburg, detract from the books fun/silly level. He makes some egregiously silly errors on the way: Buck-shot is used for deer (buck-deer, get it); Bird shot for birds oddly enough. He makes this error throughout the book for some odd reason. 'Got your back' (Gotchaback) is not Atlanta slang. It's rather ubiquitous and self explanitory, and if one has (gasp) 'working-class' friends, you may indeed hear this exotic, vulgar endearment expressed... There is a sign with Vietnamese ideographs. These do not exist. Vietnamese uses a Roman alphabet. An uneducated character, in his internal monologue, knows that the girl next door, that he does not know, is Lao. How? Some Vietnamese refugees in the book are cited as x-Khmer soldiers. This is an impossibility. This is akin to saying, "I met a buch of Jews who used to fight for the Waffen SS..." These are nit-picky details, I know, but they are 'over-the-top' oversights. More importantly, the plot is absolutely absurd, but its good fun, again, like a silly movie. However, there may be more here than meets the eye, for the book may indeed be an ironic puzzle--the joke being on the reader. But for those who can decipher through layers of decieving stupidiy, a discernable esoteric truth and trick is found. First: the book, horrid as it is, was well recieved by the New York "establishment", and it sold well. The joke: the market and critics are fools and readers are lemmings, all bow before the dollar (proof again that the best real Marxists are capitalists--this includes conservative novelists apparently). Second: the salvation through Epictetus is clearly a parody of seeking salvation in any form, and especially after failure or personal tragedy. This is akin to surviving a plane crash and then thanking one's God (if your god really liked you he could have saved you in a kinder way, like making you forget to set your alarm clock), or the trite oft lipped "everything happens for a reason" after personal tragedy (go to an AA meeting if you doubt this one). Third: riches are bad and vanity is bad. This is being preached by a dandy in a white suit who charges upwards of $25000/speech? (Wolfe was peeved when he was refused a private jet for a gig in Miami) His tongue must be in his cheek. Clearly beliefs and belief systems which denigrate material wealth, vanity, pride, and ambition are being mocked through praise. Fourth: Wolfe drops Nietzsche's Tarantula into the fray. A character uses it as a metaphor for envy. This is the most simpleminded way to interpret Nietzsche's spider, so let us not underestimate Wolfe that much. This is the key to the novel. If, and this is a big if, the novel is indeed a puzzle concealing a much more advanced theme... The Taratula is the spirit of resentment (resentiment). The effects of this may result in religious belief, asceticism (i.e., Stoicism), life denying virtue (all Judeo-Christian values, etc.), and run of the mill envy, etc. Ex. turn your poverty into holines, involuntary celibacy into chasity, cowardly natures become saintly, and the meek shall inherit the earth etc. I.e., when you lose your wad or end up in jail one may adopt a religous system (Black Islam--or is it african american islam? or Epictetus?). E.g., a lot of Christians on death row. I am not condemning metaphysical-religious beliefs, but since Nietzsche is the destroyer of such metaphysics (reporting the fact that god is dead and all) and that TW chooses to include (out of all of FN's animals) the Trantula--the monster of resentiment (and the supercharger of religious self-abeyance) and that the down and out characters adopt Stoicism and that their plight seems like an over the top deus ex machina, or a series of such tacked end to end--one must conclude one of two things: TW has lost it. or he is cleverly offering us two bad ways to navigate in our world: ambitious and selfish evil or self-deluded and life denying asceticism. Selfish evil may give you and your progeny power and wealth, but such rampant individual greed and vanity is the hallmark of a decadent, moribund society. A belief in a god, religion, system, or anything which causes one to deny animal pleasure and selfish gain will build a society, and a moral one at that. Greed, booty dancing, etc. lead to decay. It don't get much more conservative then that. But I think I'm giving TW too much credit. One last interpretation: if he is indeed honestly invoking "Zeus" as a potential savior for our society, he may be commenting on the idea that when societies disintegrate, religion and spirituality blossom (Rome, China between dynasties, etc.), or today in America: spirituality, Buddhism, and self-help gurus abound. So if TW wants to have it both ways--and don't we all--investing in an Ashram or in a spiritual publishing house may be this book's utlimate advice. Its message: believing in Zeus may be stupid, like all beliefs, but it works better than animalistic, materialistic nihilism. Or more deviously, the little people and the masses need religion so they will stay in their place, for they are clearly stupid anyway. That the masses seemed to like the message of religious/philosophic denial (preached by a fop), confirms that perhaps the masses do indeed yearn for their old opium. A foppish Stoic reeks strongly of hypocricy if earnest. But if he is mocking Stoicism, the book self-destructs. This may be deliberate. Fans of TW will have to read this one. The book will make you think. About what, I haven't a clue.
Rating: 
Summary: Oh, the fine art of reading ...
Review: A year ago reading a "man in full" was my introduction to the work of Tom Wolfe. I greatly enjoyed. I had to admit that this encyclopedia of late 20th century life in the USA may not be a true equivalent of "war and piece", but so are most books. I don't know why it took me so long, but a little while ago a decided to pick up Wolfe's clue to read Foucault's "discipline and punish". That clue by itself was not only worth the purchase price of a "man in full", it also put the book in a much better perspective. People might say, well I don't want to spend the time on Foucault to understand Wolfe better. Tthat's their problem. Maybe, they just should think twice next time before assaulting something that they don't even come remotely close to understanding.
Rating:
Summary: A Man in Full
Review: I should have quit reading when he mentioned shooting quail with buckshot. The author apparently did no research to make this a credible story. The ending was deplorable. The characters are caricatures. The dialoque unreal. The verbose, stilted descriptions of clothing, architecture and furnishings added nothing unless you consider embellishment of the author's ego worthwhile.. This will be my last Tom Wolfe book.
Rating: 
Summary: Read it!
Review: With so many reviews already available here, it is hardly necessary to add another one. I can be brief therefore. If you like Wolfe's prose style and are not one of those souls who profess they cannot stand it, this is one of his best books. It will keep you reading. Wolfe is humorous and a very keen observer of society. One thing that I noticed, and it is a very minor criticism, is that Wolfe's attempts at creating realistic settings for his books suffers here somewhat from a lack of research or personal experience. It is unimportant, but to give an example, he is way off on the climatic conditions at the wharehouse in Contra Costa County, the flight pattern of the Oakland airport and other such details of Conrad's California experience. Again, you can ignore that minor lapse, and I would not even mention it if it were not for Wolfe's attention to detail.
Rating:
Summary: Vanity of the burnt-out
Review: I had this book on my shelf for a while and only began to read it after reading Wolfe's polemics against 'old' writers such as Updike who according to him were ignoring the present and really, should be writing books just like A Man in Full. I love much of Wolfe's journalism, where he turns his own excitement at the changing world into eyepopping prose - and Bonfire of the Vanities was a scorching fictional debut. So, given his past record and his current polemic, this book beggars belief. It is baggy and readable - in other words I finished it, but hardly felt a need to digest every overspun sentence - but that is about it. That this is 'reality' I cannot quite believe. The characters, from big to small, read like ciphers; the plot is absurd; and the book it brings to mind most closely, is not any great work of fiction, but the novelisation of the TV series Dallas, where big money, big land deals, and long-boiling feuds are the very essense. Anyone who likes current rap or metal will be cringing at Wolfe's satires of the same. You can only parody music that you love (think of Zappas doo wop on Ruben and the Jets, or Neil Innes The Rutles) and this is tired, sloppy and shows an appalling 'ear' for what is really going on. The only scenes in the whole novel that actually bite are on the ranch: the catching of a dangerous snake, and the horse insemination. These are fine bits of - yes, observed, researched new journalism - the rest is cartoon hubris. Most sad of all is the lack of intellectual or philosophical thought in the novel. Instead Wolfe takes the ancient Stoics off the peg and gives us undigested bits of ancient philosophy. The last big book to attempt to fuse pop music and the ancient greeks was Rushdie's Ground Beneath her Feet, that seemed a failed novel, but at least it was funny, and at times, downright camp. A Man in Full may have sold alot of copies, but it is as much the future of literature as the Beatles '1' album is the future of music.
Rating:
Summary: engaging audio version
Review: I listened to the audio version of A man in Full, all the way from San Fransisco to Los angeles. I was a huge fan of Bonfire of the Vanities and was expecting to bedissapointed, but some combination of the writing and the fantastic audio interpretation kept me completely engaged fot the whole drive. In fact, when I finaly arrived in LA, I hadn't finished the tapes, and drove around in my boiling hot car for quite a while, dying to know what happened next! So, weather or not the novel is flawed, the audio version is engaging and extremely well produced, in this listener's humble opinion.
Rating:
Summary: Just plain fun reading
Review: Wolfe's bestseller from a couple years back is an enormously entertaining, satirical, yet all too real take on America at the close of the 20th century. Set in Atlanta, the paths of bankrupt real estate entrpreneur, Charlie Croker, and escaped felon, Conrad Hensley, are inexorably drawn together to the book's climax. Along the way, their stories hilariously touch upon themes of capitalism run amok, race relations, sex relations, crime and punishment, aging, trophy wives, and ancient Stoic philosphy. I'm not a great fan of satire, but Wolfe does it so adroitly with such well-drawn and entertaining characters that I found this book hard to put down.
Rating:
Summary: Maginificent (but flawed) portrayal of human uncertainty
Review: From the opening pages you will be drawn into a compelling world where none are without flaw and none are without sympathetic human qualities. If there are heros, we groan with them as they blunder their way through life. If there are villains, we ache for them to find some path to happiness. Wolfe depicts four main characters on a disastrous collision course: Roger White, a black lawyer who is uneasy with his own success: he feels like he has sold out his cultural heritage, and he desperately wants to find some way to reconcile his life with a sense of doing good for his community. He has just that opportunity when he is asked to help defend a young black athlete charged with rape. Unfortunately, the young black athlete is no paragon of virtue. Charlie Croker is an old-south not-trying-very-hard-not-to-be-racist real estate developer and plantation owner who is falling on hard times. He put too much of his own money into a project that was too far ahead of its time, and he is about to pay the price. In fact, everything about Croker has reached too far for too big a prize, and its all crashing down. With creditors on one side, an expensive second wife on the other, loyalty to other good old boys underneath, he finds that the only way out will require him to swallow his pride, betray his friends, and shelve his honesty. Raymond Peepgass was a smart man who got stuck in a dumb job, an also-ran executive in the bank that has loaned Croker money. He has a dead-end career, his wife has left him, and he is involved in an ugly and expensive lawsuit with a scandinavian notions buyer who says he is the father of her child. If he were a bigger man, he might have been a Charlie Croker. Well, now that Croker is on his way down, maybe he can get some of those Croker assets on his own. Conrad Hensley worked in one of Croker's properties, a meat packing warehouse in California. He married too young, and now that Croker is cutting back costs he is unemployed. Things go from bad to worse and he finds himself prison. Then he discovers Epictetus. What follows is a strange and, for the first two-thirds, believable drama that pits these four characters and dozens of other well-drawn minor characters against each other. At about that two-thirds point the book really peaks: there appears to be no escape other than total disaster. From our perspective, watching the whole of a powerful drama that the characters only have small insight into, we agonize over the choices that we know to be hopeless. In the end, however, Wolfe lets us down a little. What was building to be a marvellous philosophical treatise on stoicism and the philosophies of Epicurus and Epictetus made flesh in a compelling drama starts to unravel a bit. There is a surprising cataclysm, but it ends up a little too tidy for my taste. Nonetheless, this is a worthy successor to Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe understands people at all levels of society, and explores truly thought-provoking ethical, spiritual, and social questions through his characters. Essential reading for all Americans.
Rating:
Summary: full epic
Review: Tom Wolfe's 'A Man In Full' was so entertaining you ignored the ammount of pages in the book. The characters are larger-than-life; and very interesting.
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