Tom Wolfe's Irresistible Snap, Crackle and Pop

Tom Wolfe is an absolutely incredible author. Bonfire of the vanities in particular is an amazing read which the film adaptation only barely begins to do justice to. I also think that both A Man in Full and Back to Blood are amazing novels. The thing these books do is bring the fight for status into sharp focus while also remaining very true to life. After reading them you start to see it everywhere and it helps you to understand the actions people take in your own life. Highly recommended.

Radical Chic is available as a PDF from NY Magazine: https://nymag.com/docs/07/05/070529radical_chic.pdf

It's uncanny to read these in the context of the 2020s and see so many parallels.

These two essays in TFA were published in a larger collection[1] by Wolfe, which I’d recommend. The essay on Marshall McLuhan in particular might be interesting to HN’s audience.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pump_House_Gang

I read The Right Stuff recently and it was a pleasure. Very full of life and colorful and he really was able to get at what made these test pilots and astronauts the tick.

The TV adaptation of A Man In Full is out on Netflix now.

I first heard about the Stoic philosophy from that book.

> There are certain writers you should never read before you yourself sit down to write, like P.G. Wodehouse and Tom Wolfe

Dave Barry, too.

Let's step back a bit. Brooks mentions the Astors, Rockefellers, and Whitneys. The founder of the Astor fortunes was a butcher's son, and apparently John D. Rockefeller's father was nothing special. To quote Mrs. Archer in The Age of Innocence (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/541/pg541.txt)

""" "Don't tell me," Mrs. Archer would say to her children, "all this modern newspaper rubbish about a New York aristocracy. If there is one, neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong to it; no, nor the Newlands or the Chiverses either. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were just respectable English or Dutch merchants, who came to the colonies to make their fortune, and stayed here because they did so well. One of your great-grandfathers signed the Declaration, and another was a general on Washington's staff, and received General Burgoyne's sword after the battle of Saratoga. These are things to be proud of, but they have nothing to do with rank or class. New York has always been a commercial community, and there are not more than three families in it who can claim an aristocratic origin in the real sense of the word." """

And was Leonard Bernstein admired for his taste? I should have said it was his conducting and composing. Was Barbara Walters admired for her taste, or for ability to interview people of some interest?

In general, I reached a point where I really could resist Wolfe's effects, where I was tired of the habitual elbow in my ribs. I would remark also that according to something posted now and then on HN, he got Yeager's crash in The Right Stuff wrong, and apparently also the fiasco with Grissom's capsule. On the other hand, Ken Kesey did speak well of him.

[edit: added "also" to the second-last sentence]

Everyone who builds anything should read From Bauhaus to Our House.