Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

Author: Wolfe Tom

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"Radical chic appeared, in somewhat different form, in New York magazine in June 1970."

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Summary

"Radical chic appeared, in somewhat different form, in New York magazine in June 1970."

Description

Now with an original introduction by David Brooks, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is a funny and irreverent study of class and status by the master of New Journalism.

Tom Wolfe's two-act dissection of 1970s race relations in America is incisive and thought-provoking, an indispensable study in how white pieties have often worked against the interests of Black communities in the country.

Wolfe first takes readers back to his original hotbed of 1970s "radical chic" the party for the Black Panthers that Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, hosted at their Park Avenue penthouse. Wolfe's unerring eye for the uncanny feasts on an improbable scene that would morph into today's cocktail activism--well-heeled elites signifying their sympathy with causes related to Black emancipation through hobnobbing.

"Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers," meanwhile, unfolds on the other side of the country, in San Francisco's Office of Economic Opportunity, where Wolfe details with Kafkaesque absurdity the dysfunction, chaos, and corruption that waylays this outgrowth of the War on Poverty so that it inevitably ends up failing the underserved communities it's supposed to help.

Critic Reviews

"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

About the Author

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of more than a dozen books, including such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 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. He is credited with coining the term "the Me Decade." Among his many honors, he was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City.