books tagged “tom wolfe”

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An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper's Magazine
by Lewis H. Lapham, Ellen Rosenbush

ISBN 1879957531 (1-879957-53-1)
Hardcover, Franklin Square Pr

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- An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper's Magazine: ISBN 1879957531 (1-879957-53-1)
  Hardcover, Franklin Square Pr
The Best American Essays 1990
by Robert Atwan, Justin Kaplan

ISBN 0899199372 (0-89919-937-2)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

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- The Best American Essays 1990: ISBN 0899199372 (0-89919-937-2)
  Softcover, Houghton Mifflin
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The Best American Essays, 1987
by Gay Talese

ISBN 0899195334 (0-89919-533-4)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

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Book summary:
"this second volume ...shows that personal honesty and the frank disclosure of facts still rank high among the essayist's preoccupations" [via]
More editions of The Best American Essays, 1987:
- The Best American Essays, 1987: ISBN 0899194680 (0-89919-468-0)
  Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin
- The Best American Essays, 1987: ISBN 0899195334 (0-89919-533-4)
  Softcover, Houghton Mifflin
The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe

ISBN 0553275976 (0-553-27597-6)
Softcover, Bantam Books

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Book summary:
After Tom Wolfe defined the '60s in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and the cultural U-turn at the turn of the '80s in The Right Stuff, nobody thought he could ever top himself again. In 1987, when The Bonfire of the Vanities arrived, the literati called Wolfe an "aging enfant terrible."
He wasn't aging; he was growing up. Bonfire's pyrotechnic satire of 1980s New York wasn't just Wolfe's best book, it was the best bestselling fiction debut of the decade, a miraculously realistic study of an unbelievably status-mad society, from the fiery combatants of the South Bronx to the bubbling scum at the top of Wall Street. Sherman McCoy, a farcically arrogant investment banker (dubbed a "Master of the Universe," Wolfe's brilliant metaphorical co-opting of a then-important toy for boys), hits a black guy in the Bronx with his Mercedes and runs--right into a nightmare peopled by vicious mistresses, thin wives like "social x-rays," slime-bag politicos, tabloid hacks, and Dantesque denizens of the "justice" system. If the Coen and Marx brothers together dramatized The Great Gatsby, Wolfe's Bonfire would probably be funnier. Many think his second novel, A Man in Full, is deeper, but Bonfire will never die down.
You might find it interesting to compare the film The Bonfire of the Vanities, a fascinating calamity perpetrated by the geniuses Brian De Palma and Tom Hanks, with The Right Stuff, one of the very best films of the '80s. --Tim Appelo [via]
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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
by Tom Wolfe

ISBN 0553380648 (0-553-38064-8)
Softcover, Bantam Books

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Book summary:
They say if you remember the '60s, you weren't there. But, fortunately, Tom Wolfe was there, notebook in hand, politely declining LSD while Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters fomented revolution, turning America on to a dangerously playful way of thinking as their Day-Glo conveyance, Further, made the most influential bus ride since Rosa Parks's. By taking On the Road's hero Neal Cassady as his driver on the cross-country revival tour and drawing on his own training as a magician, Kesey made Further into a bully pulpit, and linked the beat epoch with hippiedom. Paul McCartney's Many Years from Now cites Kesey as a key influence on his trippy Magical Mystery Tour film. Kesey temporarily renounced his literary magic for the cause of "tootling the multitudes"--making a spectacle of himself--and Prankster Robert Stone had to flee Kesey's wild party to get his life's work done. But in those years, Kesey's life was his work, and Wolfe infinitely multiplied the multitudes who got tootled by writing this major literary-journalistic monument to a resonant pop-culture moment.
Kesey's theatrical metamorphosis from the distinguished author of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to the abominable shaman of the "Acid Test" soirees that launched The Grateful Dead required Wolfe's Day-Glo prose account to endure (though Kesey's own musings in Demon Box are no slouch either). Even now, Wolfe's book gives what Wolfe clearly got from Kesey: a contact high. --Tim Appelo [via]
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The Ethical Brain
by Michael Gazzaniga

ISBN 1932594019 (1-932594-01-9)
Hardcover, Univ of Chicago Pr

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- The Ethical Brain: ISBN 1932594019 (1-932594-01-9)
  Hardcover, Univ of Chicago Pr
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The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas
by Michael S. Gazzaniga

ISBN 0060884738 (0-06-088473-8)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
A provocative and fascinating look at new discoveries about the brain that challenge our ethics
The rapid advance of scientific knowledge has raised ethical dilemmas that humankind has never before had to address. Questions about the moment when life technically begins and ends or about the morality of genetically designing babies are now relevant and timely. Our ever-increasing knowledge of the workings of the human brain can guide us in the formation of new moral principles in the twenty-first century. In The Ethical Brain, preeminent neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga presents the emerging social and ethical issues arising out of modern-day brain science and challenges the way we look at them. Courageous and thought-provoking -- a work of enormous intelligence, insight, and importance -- this book explores the hitherto uncharted landscape where science and society intersect.
[via]
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- The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas: ISBN 0060884738 (0-06-088473-8)
  Softcover, Harpercollins
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom
by Conrad Black

ISBN 1586482823 (1-58648-282-3)
Softcover, Public Affairs

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Book summary:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt stands astride American history like a colossus, having pulled the nation out of the Great Depression and led it to victory in the Second World War. Elected to four terms as president, he transformed an inward-looking country into the greatest superpower the world had ever known. Only Abraham Lincoln did more to save America from destruction. But FDR is such a large figure that historians tend to take him as part of the landscape, focusing on smaller aspects of his achievements or carping about where he ought to have done things differently. Few have tried to assess the totality of FDR's life and career.

Conrad Black rises to the challenge. In this magisterial biography, Black makes the case that FDR was the most important person of the twentieth century, transforming his nation and the world through his unparalleled skill as a domestic politician, war leader, strategist, and global visionary--all of which he accomplished despite a physical infirmity that could easily have ended his public life at age thirty-nine. Black also takes on the great critics of FDR, especially those who accuse him of betraying the West at Yalta. Black opens a new chapter in our understanding of this great man, whose example is even more inspiring as a new generation embarks on its own rendezvous with destiny.
[via]
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From Bauhaus to Our House
by Tom Wolfe

ISBN 1555043798 (1-55504-379-8)
Hardcover, Chivers North Amer

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Book summary:
Tom Wolfe, "America's most skillful satirist" (The Atlantic Monthly), examines the strange saga of American architecture in this sequel to The Painted Word.
[via]
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Hooking Up
by Tom Wolfe

ISBN 0312420234 (0-312-42023-4)
Softcover, Picador USA

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Book summary:
Tom Wolfe's name is now so well known that the cover of his new collection bears just that: Tom Wolfe's name. No title, no picture, just the name, with an elegant design twining through it. Flip the thing on its side and you'll find that its title, Hooking Up, gives little idea of its function. But investigation soon reveals an oleo of reportage, fiction, and acrimonious name-calling. The latter, of course, makes for the best reading. In "My Three Stooges," Wolfe reviles the three big men of American letters--Updike, Mailer, and Irving--who cast aspersions on his second novel. Apparently, "the allergens for jealousy were present. Both Updike and Mailer had books out at the same time as A Man in Full, and theirs had sunk without a bubble. With Irving there was the Dickens factor." Wolfe gets in a lot of figures about what a big hit his book was with the reading public, and a few gentle reminders about other writers who were big hits of their times--little guys like Twain and Tolstoy.
Equally bitter fun are his two famous 1965 satires from the New York Herald Tribune. As always, Wolfe's titles lead you a good way into the actual stories: "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" and "Lost in the Whichy Thickets: The New Yorker." Wolfe, clotheshorse of note, gets off some of his best cracks at the expense of New Yorker editor William Shawn's fashion sense: "He always seems to have on about twenty layers of clothes, about three button-up sweaters, four vests, a couple of shirts, two ties, it looks that way, a dark shapeless suit over the whole ensemble, and white cotton socks." The rest of the reported pieces are unexceptional, and while the novella Ambush at Fort Bragg makes the most of its setting--a Dateline-like newsmagazine--it lacks the irresistible momentum required to drag most readers into a novella. Still, it's fun to watch the author reprise his lifelong role of unlikely underdog: between his sniping at the literary elite and his mocking of the precious New Yorker set, Tom Wolfe makes like a defender of the common man. --Claire Dederer [via]
More editions of Hooking Up:
- Hooking Up: ISBN 0374103828 (0-374-10382-8)
  Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
- Hooking Up: ISBN 0312420234 (0-312-42023-4)
  Softcover, Picador USA
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I Am Charlotte Simmons
by Tom Wolfe

ISBN 0312424442 (0-312-42444-2)
Softcover, Picador USA

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Book summary:
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 North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus--she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler. [via]
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The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
by Tom Wolfe

ISBN 0553380583 (0-553-38058-3)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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Book summary:
The "streamline baby" in Tom Wolfe's 1965 debut book is a hot rod, but the car's candy colors and wild lines can't match the prose style Wolfe devised to describe them. The title essay--Wolfe's first magazine article--launched the New Journalism, partly because its original title was "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm)..." His voice was more shocking than any subculture he uncovered. Until Wolfe (Ph.D., Yale), nobody struck gold by applying Ph.D.-speak to lowbrow subjects. Kurt Vonnegut famously called this an "excellent book by a genius who will do anything to get attention."
Now that everybody does what Wolfe did, his early essays smack less of genius. But attention must be paid to this pioneering peek into King Pop's tomb. The most startling thing is how soberly sensible most of the prose now appears, except for the title of the first essay, "Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can't Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!" which anticipates the far superior Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Mostly, these articles seem like straightforward introductions to some of the signal figures of the early '60s: hot-rod designer Big Daddy Roth, surf guitarist Dick Dale, teen recording tycoon Phil Spector, Andy Warhol debutante Baby Jane Holzer, the Cassius Clay-era Muhammad Ali. We even glimpse the Beatles in a profile of the yappy DJ Murray the K in "The Fifth Beatle."
The last half of the book focuses more on New York and its denizens' endless combat for social status. The last piece, "The Big League Complex," is like a 1964 warm-up exercise for The Bonfire of the Vanities. --Tim Appelo [via]
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The Literary Journalists
by Norman Sims

ISBN 0345310810 (0-345-31081-0)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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- The Literary Journalists: ISBN 0345310810 (0-345-31081-0)
  Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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A Man in Full
by Tom Wolfe

ISBN 1568956940 (1-56895-694-0)
Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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Book summary:
Ever since he published his classic 1972 essay "Why They Aren't Writing the Great American Novel Anymore," Tom Wolfe has made his fictional preferences loud and clear. For New Journalism's poster boy, minimalism is a wash, not to mention a failure of nerve. The real mission of the American writer is to produce fat novels of social observation--the sort of thing Balzac would be dishing up if he had made it into the Viagra era. Wolfe's manifesto would have had a hubristic ring if he hadn't actually delivered the goods in 1987 with The Bonfire of the Vanities. Now, more than a decade later, he's back with a second novel. Has the Man in White lived up to his own mission?
On many counts, the answer would have to be yes. Like its predecessor, A Man in Full is a big-canvas work, in which a multitude of characters seems to be ascending or (rapidly) descending the greasy pole of social life: "In an era like this one," a character reminds us, "the twentieth century's fin de siècle, position was everything, and it was the hardest thing to get." Wolfe has changed terrain on us, to be sure. Instead of New York, the focus here is Atlanta, Georgia, where the struggle for turf and power is at least slightly patinated with Deep South gentility. The plot revolves around Charlie Croker, an egomaniacal good ol' boy with a crumbling real-estate empire on his hands. But Wolfe is no less attentive to a pair of supporting players: a downwardly mobile family man, Conrad Hensley, and Roger White II, an African American attorney at a white-shoe firm. What ultimately causes these subplots to converge--and threatens to ignite a racial firestorm in Atlanta--is the alleged rape of a society deb by Georgia Tech football star Fareek "The Cannon" Fanon.
Of course, a detailed plot summary would be about as long as your average minimalist novel. Suffice it to say that A Man in Full is packed with the sort of splendid set pieces we've come to expect from Wolfe. A quail hunt on Charlie's 29,000-acre plantation, a stuffed-shirt evening at the symphony, a politically loaded press conference--the author assembles these scenes with contagious delight. The book is also very, very funny. The law firms, like upper-crust powerhouse Fogg Nackers Rendering & Lean, are straight out of Dickens, and Wolfe brings even his minor characters, like professional hick Opey McCorkle, to vivid life:
In true Opey McCorkle fashion he had turned up for dinner wearing a plaid shirt, a plaid necktie, red felt suspenders, and a big old leather belt that went around his potbelly like something could hitch up a mule with, but for now he had cut off his usual torrent of orotund rhetoric mixed with Baker Countyisms.
Readers in search of a kinder, gentler Wolfe may well be disappointed. Retaining the satirist's (necessary) superiority to his subject, he tends to lose his edge precisely when he's trying to move us. Still, when it comes to maximalist portraiture of the American scene--and to sheer, sentence-by-sentence amusement--1998 looks to be the year of the Wolfe, indeed. --James Marcus [via]
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A Man in Full Pt. 1: A Novel
by Tom Wolfe

ISBN 0374270325 (0-374-27032-5)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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Book summary:
Man in Full, A: A Novel, by Wolfe, Tom [via]
More editions of A Man in Full Pt. 1: A Novel:
- A Man in Full Pt. 1 : A Novel: ISBN 0553580930 (0-553-58093-0)
  Softcover, Bantam Books
- A Man in Full Pt. 1: A Novel: ISBN 0374270325 (0-374-27032-5)
  Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Marx Brothers Movies
by Paul D. Zimmerman

ISBN 042502928X (0-425-02928-X)
Softcover, Putnam Pub Group

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More editions of Marx Brothers Movies:
- Marx Brothers Movies: ISBN 042502928X (0-425-02928-X)
  Softcover, Putnam Pub Group
New Journalism
by Tom Wolfe

ISBN 0060471832 (0-06-047183-2)
Softcover, Harpercollins College Div

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Book summary:
'The hell with it ...let chaos reign ...louder music, more wine ...All the old traditions are exhausted and no new one is yet established. All bets are off! The odds are cancelled! It's anybody's ballgame ...' Tom Wolfe introduces and exults in his generation's journalistic talent: Truman Capote inside the mind of a psychotic killer Hunter S. Thompson skunk drunk at the Kentucky Derby Michael Herr dispatching reality from the Vietnam killing fields Rex Reed giving the star treatment to the ageing Ava Gardner As well as Norman Mailer Joe Eszterhas Terry Southern Nicholas Tomalin George Plimpton James Mills Gay Talese Joan Didion and many other legends of tape and typewriter telling it like it is from Warhol's Factory to the White House lawn, from the saddle of a Harley to the toughest football team in the US. [via]
More editions of New Journalism:
- New Journalism: ISBN 0060147075 (0-06-014707-5)
  Hardcover, Harper & Row
- New Journalism: ISBN 0060471832 (0-06-047183-2)
  Softcover, Harpercollins College Div
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Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
by Tom Wolfe

ISBN 0553380621 (0-553-38062-1)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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Book summary:
The phrase radical chic was coined by Tom Wolfe in 1970 when Leonard Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers at his duplex apartment on Park Avenue. That incongrous scene is re-created here in high fidelity as is another meeting ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment.
[via]
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The Right Stuff
by Tom Wolfe

ISBN 1579124585 (1-57912-458-5)
Hardcover, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Incorporated

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Tom Wolfe began The Right Stuff at a time when it was unfashionable to contemplate American heroism. Nixon had left the White House in disgrace, the nation was reeling from the catastrophe of Vietnam, and in 1979--the year the book appeared--Americans were being held hostage by Iranian militants. Yet it was exactly the anachronistic courage of his subjects that captivated Wolfe. In his foreword, he notes that as late as 1970, almost one in four career Navy pilots died in accidents. "The Right Stuff," he explains, "became a story of why men were willing--willing?--delighted!--to take on such odds in this, an era literary people had long since characterized as the age of the anti-hero."
Wolfe's roots in New Journalism were intertwined with the nonfiction novel that Truman Capote had pioneered with In Cold Blood. As Capote did, Wolfe tells his story from a limited omniscient perspective, dropping into the lives of his "characters" as each in turn becomes a major player in the space program. After an opening chapter on the terror of being a test pilot's wife, the story cuts back to the late 1940s, when Americans were first attempting to break the sound barrier. Test pilots, we discover, are people who live fast lives with dangerous machines, not all of them airborne.
Wolfe traces Alan Shepard's suborbital flight and Gus Grissom's embarrassing panic on the high seas (making the controversial claim that Grissom flooded his Liberty capsule by blowing the escape hatch too soon). The author also produces an admiring portrait of John Glenn's apple-pie heroism and selfless dedication. By the time Wolfe concludes with a return to Yeager and his late-career exploits, the narrative's epic proportions and literary merits are secure. Certainly The Right Stuff is the best, the funniest, and the most vivid book ever written about America's manned space program. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]
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UN Homme, UN Vrai
by Tom Wolfe

ISBN 2266100114 (2-266-10011-4)
Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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Book summary:
1013pages. poche. broché. Charlie Croker, richissime promoteur de soixante ans, a bâti son immense empire à Atlanta. Il est le symbole de l'Amérique blanche triomphante -jusqu'à ce qu'un placement immobilier hasardeux le menace de banqueroute. Fareek Fanon, célèbre footballeur noir tout droit sorti du ghetto d'Atlanta, est accusé de viol par une riche et influente Blanche. Les émeutes raciales menacent la ville: Atlanta la Blanche, ville de pouvoir et d'argent, s'oppose à Atlanta la Noire. Charlie Croker, ancien champion universitaire de football, ne pourrait-il pas réconcilier les deux partis ? La confrontation entre ces deux univers, orchestrée par un jeune et brillant avocat de la bourgeoisie noire, dévoile une Amérique cosmopolite, gangrenée par le racisme et la violence, dans laquelle se joue une inoubliable comédie humaine. [via]
More editions of UN Homme, UN Vrai:
- UN Homme, UN Vrai: ISBN 2266100114 (2-266-10011-4)
  Softcover, Distribooks Inc

Spanish

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Soy Charlotte Simmons / I Am Charlotte Simmons
by Tom Wolfe

ISBN 8466619577 (84-666-1957-7)
Softcover, Ediciones Urano

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Book summary:
With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive firsthand observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s in this story of Charlotte Simmonsa sheltered freshman from North Carolina. Upon first arriving at Dupont University and witnessing its Gothic spires, manicured lawns, and elite tradition, Charlotte sees her new life as an academic dream made real. But she soon learns that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, social status, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.
[via]
More editions of Soy Charlotte Simmons / I Am Charlotte Simmons:
- Soy Charlotte Simmons / I Am Charlotte Simmons: ISBN 8466619577 (84-666-1957-7)
  Softcover, Ediciones Urano

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