In these two devastatingly funny essays, Tom Wolfe examines political stances, social styles, "black rage," and "white guilt" in our status-minded world.
In "These Radical Chic Evenings," Wolfe focuses primarily on one symbolic event: a gathering of the politically correct at Leonard Bernstein's duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Black Panther Party. He re-creates the incongruous scene and its astonishing repercussions with high fidelity.
And in "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers," Wolfe travels to San Francisco to survey another meeting-ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment. This time the meeting deals with the newly emerging art of confrontation, as practiced by San Francisco's militant minorities in response to a highly bureaucratized poverty program.
With his fourth book, which brought the phrase "radical chic" into the cultural lexicon, Wolfe has never been more unflinching with his patented social criticism.
Tom Wolfe (1931–2018) was the author of numerous books considered contemporary classics, including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, among others, and several of his books have been made into major motion pictures. He was also a journalist and founder of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He is credited with introducing such terms as “the right stuff,” “radical chic,” “the Me Decade,” and “good ol’ boy” into the English lexicon. A native of Richmond, he earned his BA degree at Washington and Lee University and a PhD in American studies at Yale.View all by Tom Wolfe
