Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

Tom Wolfe
$18.90
Publication Date: July 21st, 2009
Publisher:
Picador
ISBN:
9780312429133
Pages:
144
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Description

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is classic Tom Wolfe, a funny, irreverent, and "delicious" (The Wall Street Journal) dissection of class and status by the master of New Journalism

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 incongruous scene is re-created here in high fidelity as is another meeting ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment. Radical Chic provocatively explores the relationship between Black rage and White guilt.

Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, set in San Francisco at the Office of Economic Opportunity, details the corruption and dysfunction of the anti-poverty programs run at that time. Wolfe uncovers how much of the program's money failed to reach its intended recipients. Instead, hustlers gamed the system, causing the OEO efforts to fail the impoverished communities.

About the Author

Tom Wolfe (1930–2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of contemporary classics like The Right Stuff and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York Magazine, and is credited with coining the term, “The Me Decade.” Among his many honors, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City.

Praise for Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“What Tom Wolfe has done is create an appallingly funny, cool, small, deflative two-scene social drama about America's biggest, hottest, and most perplexing problem--the confrontation between Black Rage and White Guilt.” —Time magazine

“Wolfe's genius is that he is fair; he puts the Bernstein part in perspective against the background of New York social history. Read it and weep with laughter.” —Houston Post

“A sociological classic . . . At Wolfe's hands the socialites get a roasting they will long remember.” —Saturday Review

“Tom Wolfe understands the human animal like no sociologist around. He tweaks his reader's every buried though and prejudice. He sees through everything. He is as original and outrageous as ever.” —The New York Times

“Uproariously funny and socially perceptive . . . a penetrating dissection of the confusion among the classes and the search for status.” —Women's Wear Daily

“Tom Wolfe at his most clever, amusing, and irreverent.” —San Franciscio Chronicle

“Absolutely brilliant. One of the finest examples of reporting and social commentary I have read anywhere.” —Gay Talese