Rating: 
Summary: "MAN" does not live up to expectations
Review: Though this book contains many excellent passages which are a pleasure to read, it wanders off course, contains filler and ultimately has an unbelievable plot structure. It does not meet the expectations raised by BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. Once they hype has died down and the word gets out from people who have read the novel, it should drop from the best seller lists.
Rating:
Summary: "MAN" not up to expectations
Review: Though this long novel contains many excellent passages which are a pleasure to read, it also wanders off course, contains filler and ultimately has an unbelievabe plot structure. It will not achieve the success of BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES and will probably fall from the bestseller lists when the hype has died down and enough people have read it for the word to get out.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Bonfires, but close
Review: I flew through this novel in two days,never quite sure where it was all leading at any given point, but racing to get there. Then a major let-down as Wolfe wraps everything up in the last few pages in a nice neat (too neat)ending. The characterizations are great, the weaving of the various storylines is skillful and the writing is excellent,detailed and funny - but the end left me flat. I closed the cover wondering if Wolfe got tired of writing these characters or if the joke was on me. Nonetheless - it was a great two day read! Wolfe has added a new dimension to the characterization of society women to accompany his 'social X-rays' of Bonfire fame - the boys with breasts - great imagery.
Rating: 
Summary: Wow!
Review: Stayed up all night. Buy it, you'll love it. Wolfe at his finest
Rating:
Summary: "Saddlebags" supplants "Astronauts go to Houston"
Review: In "The Right Stuff" there's a chapter about Lyndon Johnson's moving the space program from Cape Canaveral to Houston. Houston puts on a great party for the seven heroes of space exploration, described in what was until now my all-time favorite chapter of narrative skewering. Peepgass, walking wounded after the war, is a character at least as in-your-face as Herb Snout from Kar Kastle, but nuanced for the millenium.
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Summary: Over-rated and based on a flimsy premise
Review: As a sixth-generation Atlanta native I couldn't wait to read Tom Wolfe's take on my city. I was disappointed to discover his preoccupation with cartoonish southern stereotypes. Main character Charlie Croaker belongs on an episode of Dukes of Hazards, not in a novel pretending to be an authentic examination of the modern south. And I couldn't buy the premise that an accusation of black-white date-rape would constitute any serious threat to Atlanta's racial harmony, which has survived far worse without any such fireworks. All in all, I thought the book was full of cheap southern-bashing caricatures, overblown prose, and ridiculously macho-loving scenes. One more reference to manly men and men in the full sap of their youth and I'd have tossed this book out the window of my Buckhead townhouse or my plantation manor, since Tom Wolfe seems convinced that all us southerners fit one extreme or the other. A Man in Full would be better titled "A Man Too Full Of Himself," and the man would be Tom Wolfe.
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Summary: Lots of words...for what?
Review: I can't rave about this book. The powerful scenes, like the one describing Charlie Croker's encounter with a rattlesnake, a horse breeding scene,or the prison scenes, as well as some very dead-on humorous scenes, such as the description of the meeting and conversation between Croker and the football player, don't offset the problems. The thing really is just too damn long, and the problem, I think lies in the same thing that gives the book strength (isn't that so often the way)- the descriptions. Wolfe just goes on and on and on and on, for example, about the ins and outs of the Atlanta landscape. By the end of this book, even someone unfamiliar with the city would be able to find their way around without a roadmap, I've no doubt. And for what purpose? Too often in this book, you get the feeling that the lengthy descriptions - of landscapes, interiors, and even people's physical appearance- are present less to serve the story and Wolfe's theme than to say, "Hey! Look what I saw and how well I describe it!" I also think some of the subplots could have been cut, streamlines and made us (me at least) a little less impatient by p. 600 to see how the whole thing would be resolved. Finally, and this is very sad to report - the end of this book is really, really lame. Shockingly lame - as in a lengthy chapter in which two of the major characters sit around and have a conversation in which they wrap up plot points: "Hey, what happened to Mrs. Croker?" "Oh well, let me tell you...." I was stunned by the use of such a creaky device. So is this book worth reading? Yes. It's entertaining and absorbing. But is it the novel of the year? Does it really present us with a panorama of American life at the end of the century? Not at all - it gives us the story of rich Georgians, some poor Georgians, and people living on the edge in Alameda County. I think what happens in the end is that unrelenting specificity of Wolfe's prose, which has its own powerful value, nevertheless works to prevent this book from being about much more than the events he describes within. It's a fine line - great fiction draws us because of the specificity of the narration...but then, within the context of that story about specific people and places, the moral vision of the writer points us to something more about reality itself, which then functions as a revelation and illumination in our own lives - it's this last part that Tom Wolfe just hasn't gotten down yet. We can tell he's got the sensibility and the conviction, but he's not quite mastered the meshing of his prodigious talents of observation with the vision.
Rating:
Summary: a smartish labyrinth, packaged in a snazzy white suit.
Review: When all the gassy, belching literary types lean into the new millenium, lugging gloriously the weight of the previous century's best, near the top will be "A Man in Full," Wolfe's homage to the moral-seeking fabric of American life in the last decade of the last century in which America can lay claim to collective ownership of even a divided soul. These geezers won't spout it the way they will "An Invisible Man" or "Ulysses," but they don't have to -- there's enough serious literature there to drown even Harold Bloom; no, Wolfe's weighty mass will be handed out at the end, with a snicker, as something to whet the whistle on, for someone with a literary sweet tooth to gnarl on, or for someone who would like to know how the heart of how the whole thing became unravelled, and how America came to eat itself. A smartish labyrinth of colorful characters, "A Man in Full" is like the reporter's snazzy white suit; even in the middle of a prison, or in Oakland, or in a snake den, or a crack house, or in the helpful heapings of Charlie Croker's passionate ignorance, with all of its vile description, the reader never seems to get too dirty. What is the best we can say of a book? That it feeds us? I am not nourished here; I know the boat is sinking. That it points to the centerish moral landing? Honey, the center ain't holding. The best I can say of a book I say here now of this one: amidst the cauldron of defining us, it also, painstakingly, through some 740 pages, in the quietest voice, says "it's not too late. Go to the mirror, all. Learn." Wolfe teaches us, and look! Clean fingernails!
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Summary: hello?
Review: the person who thinks las vegas is in new mexico also thinks they were reviewing tom wolfe's "a man in full" ... wrong on both counts.
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Summary: "His trapezius tightened and his forearms bulged"
Review: I have to agree with another reviewer -- it's a Bonfire down south. Right down to the physical tics and aforementioned bulging forearms of practically every male character. If they don't have bulging forearms, they either (Conrad) work hauling things around in a freezer until they get them or (Wes) have a driver who does. There are scenes of searingly accurate social commentary, and it's an entertaining read, but you might almost think he waited 12 years since "Bonfire" so he could reuse some situations and dialogue with some southern accents thrown in and maybe people would have forgotten.
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