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Reading lists

If you loved The Trial of the Chicago 7, you should read these books

The 1980s was a decade of massive social, political and cultural change. 

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Books that shaped the 1980s

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Tom Wolfe's genre-defining ride through the 1960s published in Vintage Classics for the first time to mark its fiftieth anniversary

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is not simply the best book on the hippies, it is the essential book...the pushing, ballooning heart of the matter

A life-changer, a rabble-rouser, a mind-blower, a gathering of the tribes, a call to arms, a manifesto for a new society, a car repair manual, a fly-on-the-paisley-patterned-wall account of a cultural revolution – a masterpiece!

An amazing book... A book that definitely gives Wolfe the edge on the nonfiction novel

Every word seems placed with a care and a skill of contrivance... A major journalistic contribution to the future analysis of our own and America's strange period of this century

You only had to look at him… or read such books as The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff to know that Tom Wolfe was like no other

Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence

Effortlessly, elegantly, Tom Wolfe bestrode both fiction and non-fiction… a style at once objective, subjective, and hallucinatory

[Tom Wolfe’s] gleeful use of punctuation and italics, along with entertaining asides and neologisms that often quickly cemented themselves into the English lexicon, helped Wolfe stand out from other journalists

[Wolfe] made literature fun and bores don’t like fun

A Day-Glo book, illuminating, merry, surreal!

Tom Wolfe's genre-defining magical mystery tour through the 1960s published in Vintage Classics for the first time to mark its fiftieth anniversary. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JARVIS COCKER 
 
In the summer of 1964, author Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters set out on an awesome social experiment like no other. Blazing across America in their day-glo schoolbus, doped up and deep ‘in the pudding’, the Pranksters’ arrival on the scene – anarchic, exuberant and LSD-infused – would turn on an entire counter-culture, and provide Tom Wolfe with the perfect free-wheeling subject for this, his pioneering masterpiece of New Journalism. 
 
'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is not simply the best book on the hippies, it is the essential book...the pushing, ballooning heart of the matter' New York Times

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

The first of Tom Wolfe's genre-defining non-fiction books, reissued to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

This is a book that will be a sharp pleasure to reread years from now, when it will bring back, like a falcon in the sky of memory, a whole world that is currently jetting and jazzing its way somewhere or other

He impales trends and fads, pretensions and swaggerings, with needle-sharp wit

Might well be required reading in courses with names like American studies

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons and Back to Blood. He received the National Book Foundation's 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Tom Wolfe's debut collection of essays - a brilliant, form-bending dive into the future of America as it careened through the 1960s 
 
In 1965, Tom Wolfe dropped like a bomb onto the American literary scene with his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, an incandescent panorama of American counter-culture, its dances, bouffant hairdos, customised cars and rock concerts. Capturing the energy of the age in its portraits of Phil Spector, Cassius Clay, Las Vegas and the Nanny Mafia – as well as asking, why do doormen hate Volkswagens? – Wolfe’s flamboyant essay collection remains one of the great, revolutionary landmarks of modern non-fiction. 
 
'Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence' Daily Telegraph

The Kingdom of Speech

From the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities, the maestro storyteller and reporter provocatively argues that what we think we know about speech and human evolution is wrong.

A great journalist with a whip-like satirical prose style… Wolfe’s great gift is to make the heavy seem light and this book is such an entertaining polemic that I read it in a day and immediately wanted to read it again.

You’re in the hands of a master who has never written a dull word in his life. Tom Wolfe, America’s greatest man of letters, is 85 and still fizzing with energy and insight… Wolfe packs a lot in it, [The Kingdom of Speech] writing with the fluency and vigour of a man one-third his age.

The style is instantly recognisable, and the book hurtles on for 160 pages of wicked, opinionated, high-velocity prose.

A marvelous mix of gleeful energy and whip-around-the-neck control, and his book is a gas to read.

It is clear how much we have missed him… The wonder of his book is its point of view. He is a polemicist, a slayer of reputation and pretension… It is wonderful to have him back.

[Kingdom of Speech is] vastly entertaining… compulsively readable.

The story of an academic dispute in the world of linguistics is beautifully told by a world-class storyteller.

'A great journalist with a whip-like satirical prose style… Wolfe’s great gift is to make the heavy seem light and this book is such an entertaining polemic that I read it in a day and immediately wanted to read it again.' - Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times 
 
Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey through language. The Kingdom of Speech is a paradigm-shifting argument that speech - not evolution - is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements. 
 
From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, and through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hard-wired in humans, Wolfe examines the solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zig-zags of Darwinism, old and Neo, and finds it irrelevant here in our Kingdom of Speech.

Back to Blood

The Bonfire of the Vanities author, Tom Wolfe, ingeniously dissects the turbulent heart of America’s racial vortex in this exhilarating tale of sweltering Miami

Back to Blood dazzles so much that you might want to read it through dark glasses

Tom Wolfe returns with a thunderous thwack, fizzing outrageously with a slipstreamed comet of a novel… It’s even better than his great hit The Bonfire of the Vanities. Unmissable stuff

Exhilarating… The satire is scalpel-like and very funny.

Energising, fascinating – and utterly exhausting.

If this novel were rushed into A&amp;E, it would immediately be put under heavy sedation.

There is more dynamism, risk-taking and crazed energy in Wolfe’s writing than in all the Brit novels I’ve read this year.

Back to Blood, a remarkable feat for a writer now 81, gives Miami the full Tom Wolfe treatment... Nobody else writes like this and it is still an astonishingly extravagant performance.

Tom Wolfe...remains The Dude when it comes to surveying the crazed, bracing absurdities of our national life… Back to Blood is marked by both Wolfe’s stylistic freneticim and his formidable reportorial gifts… Beginning his ninth decade, Tom Wolfe has brio to burn.

Mr Wolfe’s satirical aim at the debauchery and landscape of avarice and arrogance is gleefully accurate.

[A] huge, very loud [new novel], MOSTLY IN CAPITALS, from Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood.

He is, still, at his best in the thick of a crowd, a master of group dynamics, at once in breathless close-up and sudden wide-angle.

For Christmas, I will give to dinner party conversationalists:... Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood.

What really drives all this is Wolfe’s extraordinary style.

There are some dazzling satirical riffs and politically incorrect laughs.

Energetically set against the deco licentiousness of Florida’s steamiest party capital.

Class, family, wealth and corruption are all themes in this examination of life in Miami.

[Tells] us about the way we live now... enjoyable.

Epic, hectic, satirical… It’s scathing, funny, and has great set-piece scenes

Contemporary Miami gets the Wolfe treatment in a grand, sweeping satire on race, class, lust and immigration

The Bonfire of the Vanities author, Tom Wolfe, ingeniously dissects the turbulent heart of America’s racial vortex in this exhilarating tale of sweltering Miami 
 
As the police boat speeds across Miami’s Biscayne Bay, the scene is set for Officer Nestor Camacho’s great moment of heroism. Except that in this feverous melting pot of a city, Nestor's one act of heroism can be seen as an utter betrayal of his Cuban roots. 
 
 As Nestor’s world disintegrates – his family disowns him, he can’t get a Cuban coffee without ugly stares, and his girlfriend Magdalena leaves him for her sex-addiction psychiatrist boss – his quest to right the wrongs brings him into contact with the full panorama of modern Miami. The Cuban mayor, a Yale-marinated journalist, the black police chief, the clueless baying art-buyers and an Anglo billionaire porn addict all come up for scrutiny in Tom Wolfe’s high-energy, scrupulous and hilarious reckoning with our times. 
 
‘Back to Blood dazzles so much that you might want to read it through dark glasses’ – Independent on Sunday

Hooking Up

A perfect introduction to Tom Wolfe's brilliant and masterful journalism.

I love Tom Wolfe... Whenever some big bizarro thing happens...I want the man in the white suit to do his usual exhaustive reporting, turn the labels inside out and hypocrites upside down...and tell me what's what in one of those jittering, dazzling riffs of his

The finest essayist-cum-novelist-cum-reporter of our era, Wolfe combines lively writing and endless energy with an astonishingly astute, ever-curious eye

A great introduction to Wolfe the nonfiction stylist

In Hooking Up Tom Wolfe ranges from coast to coast, observing the 'lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000' - everything from teenage sexual manners to how genetics and neuroscience are changing the way we regard ourselves. Also included in this collection are some of his most classic and enduring pieces of journalism, and 'Ambush art at Fort Bragg', his fiercely satirical novella about sting TV. 
 
Funny, often savagely so, hard-hitting and wise, Wolfe remains a unique master-chronicler of America and its future.

A Man In Full

A dissection of greed-obsessed America a decade after The Bonfire of the Vanities and on the cusp of the millennium, from the master chronicler of American culture Tom Wolfe

A hugely enjoyable and impressive read, 800-odd pages of splendid plot, terrific characterization and astounding detail... Dickens would have approved

Enthralling enough even to satisfy The Bonfire of the Vanities devotees...humane and redemptive

Fiercely and instantly addictive...this book will be a good friend to you

Powerful... Beautiful... As funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting

A masterpiece...the difference between seeing the world in slices and seeing it in full

You only have to read the first sentence to be totally gripped

Powerful...beautiful...as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting

Wolfe is a peerless observer, a fearless satirist, a genius in full

A brilliant book - vast, satirical, moving, often profound

What razor-sharp brilliance! What sublime satirical wit!... The lives of Wolfe's seemingly unconnected cast of characters, bouncing off the pages as vividly as any of Dickens', become gradually interwoven. Wolfe takes ironic swipes at greed, class, racism from both sides of the fence and financial and political corruption... A what a wonderful way Wolfe has with dialogue and with the barbaric euphemisms of street slang and rap. Sheer genius

Novels of this size... always have flaws and the occasional lull, but Wolfe's fizzy prose and amusingly mean-spirited social observations make up for any other deficiencies. Highly entertaining

There are far too many delicious examples of Wolfe's razor sharp wit and stylish writing. So I'll simply say that if you enjoy a slice of American fiction, then this book will not disappoint. Otherwise, I'll eat my hat. A big, bold, brash, brilliant book, beautifully-written. Highly recommended

NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX SERIES 
 
A dissection of greed-obsessed America a decade after The Bonfire of the Vanities and on the cusp of the millennium, from the master chronicler of American culture Tom Wolfe 
 
Charlie Croker, once a fabled college football star, is now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real estate entrepreneur-turned conglomerate king. His expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000 acre quail shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife and a half-empty downtown tower with a staggering load of debt. Wolfe shows us contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most admired novelist. 
 
&lsquo;Enthralling enough even to satisfy The Bonfire of the Vanities devotees...humane and redemptive&rsquo; &ndash; Sunday Times

The Bonfire of the Vanities

An exhilarating satire of Eighties excess that captures the effervescent spirit of New York, from one of the greatest writers of modern American prose

A noisy satire on Manhattan’s Wall Street cash-bloated plutocracy… Hugely readable.

If there is a set-book of the Eighties, it is Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. No other novel has achieved such a precise place in the imagination of the reading classes. With his first attempt at fiction Wolfe has become the 'Dickens or Balzac of his age'; the dandy journalist has become the towering genius

Wolfe's modern morality tale displays the sardonic humour and sharp appreciation of the grotesque familiar to admirers of his non fiction... Savagely funny and compelling

The air of New York crackles with an energy that causes the adrenalin to pump, until one has the illusion that this is where the whole of life is taking place. The feeling is perfectly reproduced in Wolfe's novel, which opens such cans of worms as racial hostility, dress codes, political labelling and the cynical opportunism that governs every action. It's, well, electric

Moves with a swift comic logic . . . An innovative and imaginative and intricate plot . . .welds Wolfe's descriptions of dinner parties, restaurant games, Wall Street trading, and courthouse chaos into more than a tour de force

Still very funny and smartly written a good 20 years after it was first published

Dense with research and bulging with bombast. Yet, it has to be admitted, it's also great fun

I read this novel at the end of the 1980s when greed and excess were rife, and the merger barons were making loads of money. As someone working in the City, I loved how it perfectly captured the voraciously materialistic mood. Wolfe portrays his characters with wit and accuracy.

An exhilarating satire of Eighties excess that captures the effervescent spirit of New York, from one of the greatest writers of modern American prose 
 
Sherman McCoy is a WASP, bond trader and self-appointed 'Master of the Universe'. He has a fashionable wife, a Park Avenue apartment and a Southern mistress. His spectacular fall begins the moment he is involved in a hit-and-run accident in the Bronx. Prosecutors, newspaper hacks, politicians and clergy close in on him, determined to bring him down. 
 
Exuberant, scandalous and exceptionally discerning, The Bonfire of the Vanities was Tom Wolfe's first venture into fiction and cemented his reputation as the foremost chronicler of his age. 
 
‘The air of New York crackles with an energy that causes the adrenalin to pump… The feeling is perfectly reproduced in Wolfe's novel… Electric’ – Sunday Times 
 
‘The quintessential novel of The Eighties’ – The Guardian

I Am Charlotte Simmons

A scandalous exploration of elite undergraduate life from the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities

A firecracker of a novel... A pyrotechnic delight just as dazzling as The Bonfire of the Vanities

Brilliant... Not just a rollicking comedy of campus misbehaviour but a blistering indictment of contemporary standards

Exaggerates and deflates the pretensions of America's future ruling class in hilarious style

These are Wolfe's most memorable characters and this is his best book yet

A scandalous exploration of elite undergraduate life from the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities 
 
Dupont University: the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition... or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from Sparta, North Carolina, who has come here on a full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, status, and kegs trump academic achievement every time. 
 
As Charlotte encounters Dupont's elite, she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence. But little does she realise that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives. 
 
‘A firecracker of a novel... A pyrotechnic delight just as dazzling as The Bonfire of the Vanities’ - Sunday Express

The Purple Decades

'The inventor of New Journalism-wielding his terrible swift satirist sword' Newsweek

The Purple Decades brings together the author's own selections from his list of critically acclaimed publications, including the best from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic, From Bauhaus to Our House, The Right Stuff and the complete text of Mau-Mauing and the Flak Catchers. An essential introduction to the non-fiction writing of the inventor of New Journalism.

Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe’, article: ‘You only had to look at him… or read such books as The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff to know that Tom Wolfe was like no other

The hero you couldn’t hope to emulate’, article: ‘Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence

The Right Stuff is Wolfe's best book

It is Tom Wolfe at his very best...technically accurate, learned, cheeky, risky, touching, tough, compassionate, nostalgic, worshipful, jingoistic... The Right Stuff is superb

An exhilarating flight into fear, love, beauty and fiery death... magnificent

Absolutely first class... Improbable as some of Tom's tales seem, I know he's telling it like it was

A wonderful novel and perfect book club choice, The Right Stuff is a wildly vivid and entertaining chronicle of America's early space programme. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY US ASTRONAUT SCOTT KELLY 
 
‘What is it,’ asks Tom Wolfe, ‘that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman Candle…and wait for someone to light the fuse?’ Arrogance? Stupidity? Courage? Or, simply, that quality we call 'the right stuff'? 
 
A monument to the men who battled to beat the Russians into space, The Right Stuff is a voyage into the mythology of the American space programme, and a dizzying dive into the sweat, fear, beauty and danger of being on the white-hot edge of history in the making. 
 
‘Tom Wolfe at his very best… Learned, cheeky, risky, touching, tough, compassionate, nostalgic, worshipful, jingoistic...The Right Stuff is superb’ New York Times Book Review

Tom Wolfe

Praise for The Right Stuff

Tom Wolfe’, article: ‘You only had to look at him… or read such books as The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff to know that Tom Wolfe was like no other

The hero you couldn’t hope to emulate’, article: ‘Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence

Effortlessly, elegantly, Tom Wolfe bestrode both fiction and non-fiction… a style at once objective, subjective, and hallucinatory

Tom Wolfe’, article: ‘You only had to look at him… or read such books as The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff to know that Tom Wolfe was like no other

The hero you couldn’t hope to emulate’, article: ‘Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence

Effortlessly, elegantly, Tom Wolfe bestrode both fiction and non-fiction… a style at once objective, subjective, and hallucinatory

Tom Wolfe’, article: ‘You only had to look at him… or read such books as The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff to know that Tom Wolfe was like no other

The hero you couldn’t hope to emulate’, article: ‘Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence

Effortlessly, elegantly, Tom Wolfe bestrode both fiction and non-fiction… a style at once objective, subjective, and hallucinatory

Books by Tom Wolfe

Articles featuring Tom Wolfe

If you loved The Trial of the Chicago 7, you should read these books

Books that shaped the 1980s

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