Rating: 
Summary: What a total disapointment !
Review: Having been a fan of Tom Wolfe's earlier books, with the exception of Bonfire of the Vanities, I was hopeful that his next book would be better than Bonfire. Well, I was totally wrong. This book suffers from the same problems that Bonfire did, totally unconvincing characters. Wolfe takes an inordinate amount of time painstakingly developing his characters, then gives them nowhere to go and very little to do. In a 700 plus page book he uses 650 page to develop various storylines and then, seemingly realizing he had gotten nowhere with this story, he tacks on the most contrived, absurd and insulting ending I've encountered. I literally burst into laughter, the ending was so bad. If this was the last book availible on the planet I wouldn't reccomend it to my worst enemy. I could not be more disapointed.
Rating: 
Summary: Aimed high got halfway there
Review: Maybe it's because I read "The Triumph and the Glory" and "Mother of Pearl" the week before I bought a copy of "Man in Full" but this new one from Tom Wolfe seemed to really drag in comparison. As an earlier reviewer pointed out, he spends way too much time describing objects and filling pages with tedious irrelevancies for my taste. I'm going to read "The Right Stuff" again so I can experience once more Tom Wolfe at his peak, because right now, he's in a galaxy far, far away.
Rating: 
Summary: A very interesting book.
Review: I enjoyed the book, an interesting story line. God, it was long though. I am getting rather bored with many people chacterizing rural southeners as a bunch of good old boy rednecks.
Rating:
Summary: A Man in Full was well worth the wait.
Review: There is not a contemporary American author who could have crafted such a intricate tale. His ability to weave assorted characters from all levels of Atlanta's neo-provincial cultural hierarchy captivated me from the beginning to nearly the end. That being said, the ending was anticlimatic and thin. I could envision some grizzled publisher saying "Tom, just finish the damn book." The amazing thing about the story: it could actually overcome such a half-baked ending. I can only hope we don't have to wait another 10 years for another masterpiece.
Rating: 
Summary: Couldn't Have Been Better - Totally Pleasing
Review: This is a good book, really, and I expected nothing better. It's more than just entertainment, and it does not represent literature as an art, and represents the 90s. The characters are deep. The plot is complex and some passages are very funny and it's a page turner. It justifies all the "frenesi" created around it.
Rating:
Summary: 727 pages that could have been said in 327
Review: Although the writing was great, there was way too much plodding detail in this book to make it move along. Disappointing, and I didn't care for the negative racial overtones.
Rating:
Summary: Good book. Not fantastic but worth reading
Review: This is a good book, really, but I expected something better. It's just entertainment, a good one, but it does not represent literature as an art, nether represents the 90s. The characters are not deep enough. Yes, the plot is complex and some passages are very funny and it's a page turner, but it does not justify all the "frenesi" created around it.
Rating:
Summary: A well done but incomplete satirical look at the 90s
Review: I enjoyed Bonfire when I read it a few years ago, but I couldn't quite grasp all of the irony and satire of it because I was a child during the 80s (I was born in '79). With A Man in Full, I have a much better idea of what Wolfe is aiming at even though it pertains to an older generation. And in a way, I think that's one of the book's flaws. I wish I could have read some more mockery of the younger generation of the 90s - the pop culture, the wealth and the poverty, etc. I wouldn't be so critical if he hadn't touched this subject at all, but he did when he wrote about Freaknic and Fanon's party life. He certainly could have gone deeper. Aside from this, I was engrossed with the writing, the characters, and the plot - and I think that this aspect of the novel couldn't get much better - but if I was to judge this novel as a satire of the 90s, as many are doing, I would find some holes (incidentally, similar to the holes I found in Bonfire). Oh, and the ending: at first I thought it was a little sudden like the other reviewers have been saying, but it really wasn't that unbelievable. I wish that Charlie's transformation could have been examined more, but then I thought of those evangelists that exist today (and of the whole 5th or 6th religious revival we're going through) and honestly, it doesn't seem so unrealistic anymore. And besides, it's fun to read a deus ex machina in modern literature (where Zeus doesn't get strangled on cables while descending) . . .
Rating:
Summary: a Man indeed
Review: This is what literature should be about. Mr. Wolfe takes you by the hand, you can relax, lay back and know you are going to be entertained. Superb! The end left me puzzeled though. Suddenly mr. Wolfe was gone; his work was done. A must read if you want to know LIFE!!! Compare this to The Great Story Tellers (e.g. Dostojevsky!)
Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece of Modern American Fiction
Review: Tom Wolfe's latest novel is a gripping portrayal of life in American life in the 1990's. Characters span the entire strata of American society. They allow us enlightening glimpses into worlds some of us may never otherwise see. Descriptions of characters and thier psyches are often cruel at the same time they are warm. This makes for an extremely powerful work that will completely pull you in and modify many of your current perceptions of the world if you let it.Furthermore, Wolfe's signature "wordiness" makes for a refreshing departure from the majority of contemporary American fiction which often aims to create a feeling of extremely fastpaced action by through minamalisms more appropriate for a 30 second TV advertisement than for a true work of literature. All said, A Man in Full is a masterpiece up there with those of Dickens and Twain.
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