Tom Wolfe

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.' From teenage sexual manners and mores to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves thanks to the hot new fields of genetics and neuroscience; from his legendary profile of William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker (first published in 1965), to a remarkable portrait of Bob Noyce, the man who invented Silicon Valley, Tom Wolfe the master of reportage and satire returns in vintage form.

Hooking Up

Emmett

Writing is fully what one would expect from a writer with works with crazy titles like The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. One can only guess at the confidence of a man who could cut a dandy figure in a signature white suit. Smart, snappy, sardonically winsome, his literary mannerisms and elastic rhythms echo the brisk and incisive character of journalism. Wolfe is witty & detailed but never gossipy, opinionated and wry and ever-curious. And much to this reader's amusement he skewers relentlessly the hoity-toity presumption of that curious phenomenon, the American intellectual, which to him is but an idol's wrappings in which is clothed an expert stumbling in the outer darkness beyond the sure lamplight of his field of expertise.

Despite being a reader, writer and pioneer of a new movement (New Journalism), Wolfe is full of optimism - for a new world, for modern life, for America, and broadly for civilisation's cultures and values, for the vitality of lives that flourish at an unprecedented peacetime. It is almost a travesty today to say that aloud. He went against the grain of his contemporaries, who could only deplore in chorus a time of the burgeoning middle class buoyed by the ascent of the capitalist tide as decidedly terrible, oppressive, unjust, unfair, etc. These essays freeze-dry for posterity the mood of the 20th-going-on-21st century - the slang ('hooking up'??), new vistas of scientific knowledge (semiconductors, neuroscience, psychology) and the wonder and anxiety at its potential consequences. He explores the invention of the circuit-boards, opines on the advent of social media (and is pessimistic about its meaningful impact and contributions), developments in neuroscience and man's knowledge of the brain leading him too merrily towards a deterministic view of the universe, the 'Rococo Marxists' (the card-carrying smart set), the state of modern art (no true replacements of skill and technique), 'My Three Stooges' (on fellow old writers Mailer, Updike, and Irving and their discontentments with the popular reading public) and satirizes what he sees as the petrified irrelevance of the New Yorker magazine. No matter what Wolfe writes about, two main notes stand out to this reader: (1) His caution/cynicism which hesitates at the slope towards that might've seemed self-evident or natural back then. (2) His enviable gift of condensing complex /dry passages scientific theory and history into interesting, bite-sized, essential ideas. Such as 20+ pages of the invention of the semiconductor and the founding of Intel.

Hooking Up

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