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Title: Man in Full by Tom Wolfe ISBN: 0-613-21962-7 Publisher: Sagebrush Education Resources Pub. Date: 01 September, 1999 Format: Library Binding Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.05

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Average Customer Rating: 3.39 (857 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: Bonfire of Atlanta-ties
Comment: If you have substantial time to kill and don't care much how you spend it, this is the read for you. Wolfe does have the ability to spin out a yarn and draw one in with the hope of a satisfying resolution of multiple story lines involving a myriad of characters. WRONG!! The reader is bludgeoned over and over again with ham-handed caricatures of the main characters long after we get the point (Charlie Croker is a nedneck cracker. Roger White has difficulty resolving his ethnic identity as an African-American with his position in a white shoe law firm. Etc, etc., etc.) The descriptions of black culture and life are of the mortifying, limousine-liberal, "white- man's-burden" variety. (In the Freaknic scene, one can almost imagine Josephine Baker dancing in a banana skirt to the sound of tom-toms.) The string of coincidences that "tie together" the various plot lines is absurd. The philosophy is of the Cliff Notes variety. The ending has the principal characters (and the judicial system) completely reversing everything they have done or said for the previous 700 pages or so, all for no apparent reason. The subplot involving Croker's ex-wife adds nothing. Mr. Wolfe is an author whose production is prodigious but whose skills and insights are disappointingly superficial. I wanted to like this book but, as you can tell, found that impossible. Like "Bonfire of the Vanities" before it, the fix is in. Unfortunately, the joke is on us.

Rating: 4
Summary: A hugely ambitious panaromic view of modern America
Comment: Tom Wolfe is one of my favorite writers, although he-- like any other writer-- has his faults. But at least, unlike most other modern fiction writers, he sets his sights high and keeps his feet firmly grounded in reality. You know for a fact that not a sentence in this novel was written without Wolfe doing meticulous research out in the field: i.e., amidst the fascinating tapestry of quirky, ever-changing subcultures that constitute the USA at the close of the century. No magical realism or airy, groundless personal introspection here, thank heavens!

Man in Full takes us from the top of Atlanta society to the fringes of the San Francisco Bay Area, and we're introduced to an engrossing cast of characters from a Hawaiian prisoner in California to the upper-middle-class black kids partying at Freaknik and on and on. The ending is a letdown, and Wolfe succumbs to the most ancient and creaky of plot devices to close the book. but along the way you're in for a wild ride! Wolfe should be commended for being one of the few modern American writers who attempt to portray the details of American culture as they really are-- in all their horror and glory.

Rating: 3
Summary: Self-conscious classic
Comment: Both insightful and almost tediously broad. Wolfe's much-hyped novel of 1998 feigns a Stoic pride in our post-Christian world, but doesn't seem to really put the pieces together in a cohesive narrative structure. The characters get jumbled around, the myriad plots cross artificially, but the prose is strangely catchy. Worthwhile if only to see where conservatism ends up without faith.