I have to admit, I've never read a Tom Wolfe book. Does anyone have some good recommendations?
Frankly, Bonfire is worth reading just for unforgettable lines like this one: "If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested."
"One breath of scandal, and not only would the Giscard scheme collapse but his very career would be finished! And what would he do then? I’m already going broke on a million a year! The appalling figures came popping up into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000. But he had to pay out $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million loan he had to take out to buy the apartment... Of the $560,000 remaining of his income last year, $44,400 was required for the apartment’s monthly maintenance fee… $18,000 for heat, utilities, insurance and repairs, $6,000 for lawn and hedge cutting, $8,000 for taxes. Entertaining at home and in restaurants had come to $37,000. This was a modest sum compared to what other people spent..."
Not that this is at all bad, but it was a change from what I was otherwise used to reading as a teenager.
The book was pure capture-the-moment 1980's New York City, and the movie captured none of that and featured Tom Hanks' worst work since Bosom Buddies.
I saw the movie when it first came out but never read the book. I thought the movie was good and couldn't understand why it got so many bad reviews. What made the book so much better?
The subtle nuances and key moments that I love are rarely translated to the screen. It's perfectly understandable, because they're two very different forms of fiction and the movie rarely has time to be much more than the Cliff's Notes version, but it's still disappointing.
When I've seen the movie first, I can appreciate it for its own sake.
(So far, I have had one exception: No Country For Old Men - I think the movie captures the book just perfectly.)
Maybe, absent a book, the movie was just mostly forgettable. There were better films involving 80s financial types like Wall Street. But we’d probably remember Bonfire as a minor film that largely wasted star power through miscasting etc. rather than a bomb.
The Devil's Candy is about how a writer was given full, uncensored access to the production from inception to release, because everyone thought it was going to be a puff piece of a book about how great everyone was. But in reality, the author got to see how a combination of creative egos and studio mismanagement (plus bad casting, a compromised script, I mean, EVERYTHING) created one of the biggest hollywood flops to that point. It's such a good read.
I haven't read the book or seen the movie (yet) but The Devil's Candy was an incredible look into how badly things can go in Hollywood. You can probably generalize it to any large project where multiple competing interests all have a stake.
(Although one never knows whom to believe when reading self-justifying finger pointing like this.)
"The facts are clear. Chuck Yeager proved incapable of doing the job. He was totally outside his element. He was a natural pilot who had learned by experience and feel, but never really understood stability, just ‘sensed’ how airplanes would act, but aerodynamics and space dynamics are night and day. If he was to fail, I expected it to be outside the aerodynamics region.
But not even that can excuse his accident, which was his fault, alone and was an error of bad pilot technique during normal, aerodynamic flight. His shortcoming was inability to gain and maintain the 70 degree climb angle. That required strict and delicate airplane control. No more and no less."
If you like Yeager, I highly recommend reading his memoirs - it makes The Right Stuff seem like an amateur hour aviation book.
I doubt that.
The Right Stuff is not simply a book about Yeager. And while Yeager is a fascinating and exciting man and truly a hero, Tom Wolfe is one of the greatest non-fiction stylists of the twentieth century. I would be very surprised if Chuck Yeager could write, or commission a ghost writer, with one tenth the chops of Tom Wolfe.
Sure, if all you're looking for is style.
As a person interested in aviation (and a good story), 'Yeager' is my favorite. The Right Stuff was a good experience, but I probably won't re-read it again.
I disliked "Bonfire of the Vanities" because it was clear to me that Wolfe had fallen into self-plagiarism. It felt to me that the same fate befell Hunter Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut. It didn't take away the pleasure of reading their earlier works, but prompted me to look for different voices.