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Title: A Man in Full: A Novel by Tom Wolfe ISBN: 0553580930 Publisher: Bantam Books Pub. Date: 05 October, 1999 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $8.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.38
Rating: 3
Summary: Too condescending, contrived abrubt ending
Comment: It seems Wolfe tries to convince people that he really knows something about Atlanta by dropping the names of every shopping center, office building, neighborhood and major road in the metro area at some point in the book. I enjoy details, but the superfluous namedropping became tiresome. My main problem with the book is the same as just about everyone else's: the ending. For all the detail Wolfe provides in the first 700 pages, the most critical events of the novel occur in the last twenty. The reader is just left out to dry. It is as if Wolfe just wrote to page 700, then got tired and decided to wrap it up as quick as possibly. I might have been able to buy into the ending a little better if he had spent more time on it, or if he had developed any character traits in Croker that would lend credibility to his ultimate decision. Unfortunately, Wolfe does neither, so the ending is abrupt, unbelievable, and feels disjointed from the rest of the novel. I still think it was a fun novel and an easy read, but certainly not great literature. If you don't expect more than some interesting characters, contrived plot-lines, and a few laughs, you won't be dissappointed.
Rating: 4
Summary: Worth it if only to finish a 742 page book so quickly.
Comment: Being a native Atlantan, I pretty much had to read it out of curiosity. I also would have read it anyway, having enjoyed "Bonfire" a decade ago. Tom Wolfe's observations and descriptions are so vivid and evocative that you don't quite mind the occasional melodrama and the fact Wolfe feels compelled to include every last scrap of research he made for the book in the book, complete with sometimes almost patronizing explanations. That said, he gave a pretty accurate feeling of Atlanta, a city locked in a perpetual state of adolescent lack of confidence. Atlanta wants to be a big city but is scared of the negatives that come with being a big city. The story of Conrad Hensley was infinitely more compelling than the saga of Charlie Croker (which is also interesting, don't get me wrong), more than makes up for any shortcomings elsewhere in the story and would have made a fine 400 page book.Another Amazon reviewer here accurately compared the silly epilogue to the end of a "Scooby Doo" episode. I would definitely second that, and also compare it to the ridiculous lecture Simon Oakland gives at the end of (the original) "Psycho." Sometimes it's best to let the reader imagine how things turn out and who's better off. Okay, there's another editing suggestion, the epilogue could've been deleted entirely, leaving out the neat-little-wrapped-up-with-a-ribbon summations awkwardly delivered in unbelievable dialogue (it's a book, Tom, just narrate this if you must) and still have a hefty, respectable 726 page book.But really, a fine book, funny, insightful and thought provoking.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Tom Wolfe Masterwork
Comment: In this wonderfully complex, funny, and often harrowing novel, Tom Wolfe explores peoples' obsessions with status, making money, and achieving success. While we often admire the builders and the athletes of the world, we often forget that they, too, are human beings, with many of the shortcomings we all have. Wolfe also shows the flip side of this admiration: how we love to read newspaper stories about celebrities, but often are secretly titillated when their foibles and failures are revealed. We rationalize, "maybe we are better off than them, afterall?"
Charlie Croker, former college football player and master real estate developer, has it all. He is incredibly wealthy, owns an enormous plantation ("Turpmtine") in Atlanta, Georgia with all the trappings: servants, horses, airplanes, and a young and beautiful, sexy, and smart second wife. Charlie is also 60 years old, impotent, ailing with an old knee injury, and on the verge of bankruptcy. He is haunted by his creditors from PlannersBank, and is in danger of losing it all.
Fareek "the Cannon" Farron is a young, African-American, college football star, who is admired, not only for his strength and great athletic ability, but also for his rare achievement of rising above the poverty and criminality of the South Atlanta neighborhood of his childhood. Rumors of Fannon's alleged rape of the daughter of a prominent, white businessman threaten to ruin his reputation and possibly to disrupt race relations in Atlanta.
Conrad is a poor white, 23 year old warehouse worker in one of Charlie Croker's California frozen food outlets. Conrad is an honest, hard working, and exceedingly principled young man who does not have much in the way of money or possessions. He also has a nagging mother-in-law who believes he is a failure as well. Through a series of horrible mishaps and misunderstandings, Conrad is jailed and could very well lose his wife and children. Through his reading of a book of dialogues of the ancient Greco-Roman Stoics that his wife mistakenly sends to him while he is in jail, Conrad learns a new philosophy of life. This philosophy, which Conrad later imparts to Charlie Croker, changes both of their lives forever. They come to realize that there are far more important things than the lure of "success" and material goods. It is no tragedy if one loses all of these things. What is more important is what is left: the inner self, the dignity, "the spirit" that all human being have. That is what sustains life when all else is gone.
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Title: The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe ISBN: 0553275976 Publisher: Bantam Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1988 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe ISBN: 0312420234 Publisher: Picador Pub. Date: October, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: In Our Time by Tom Wolfe ISBN: 0553380605 Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub (Trd Pap) Pub. Date: 05 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Right Stuff: A Novel by Tom Wolfe ISBN: 0553381350 Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub (Trd Pap) Pub. Date: 30 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe ISBN: 0553380648 Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub (Trd Pap) Pub. Date: 05 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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