Hooking Up - by Tom Wolfe

Book Synopsis

Tom Wolfe shows us the mad spectacle of American life at millennium's end.

​​Tom Wolfe surveys America on the threshold of a new millennium, observing "the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000."

No corner of the frantically, gropingly changing country is sheltered from his keen, satirical eye. He fixes his gaze on the transformations in the mating rituals of the American teenager, and examines how quantum advances in science are changing the way we see ourselves. Hooking Up also brings back Wolfe's infamous diatribe lampooning his contemporaries Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving, and his legendary profile of William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker.

With Hooking Up, Wolfe shows us a vision of America raring to change as it enters a new era.

Review Quotes

"At heart he is and always will be a terrific reporter. Hooking Up provides a great introduction to Wolfe the nonfiction stylist: the peerless portraitist, the contrarian social critic and the literary bomb thrower. The book's title is a sexual metaphor, but in Wolfe's hands, it means making connections among the culture's disparate corners. And nobody hooks up better than he does." --Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

"The rich retrospective of one of America's finest writers." --Michael Pakenham, Baltimore Sun

"The publication of Hooking Up, Wolfe's first book of short pieces in 20 years, is reason enough for celebration . . . Delicious." --Benjamin Svetkey, Entertainment Weekly

"Turn to the three essays grouped under the title "The Human Beast," and you will be in Wolfe heaven. The first of these--is an exuberant history of the birth of Silicon Valley...'Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill' moves from the semiconductor industry to the Internet and then, by a kind of intuitive leap, to neuroscience and sociobiology. 'Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died' delves into brain imaging and the genetic determination of character. Jesuit priest Piere Teilhard de Chardin, closet Catholic Marshall McLuhan, and scientist Edmund O. Wilson are the pivotal figures of these two essays." --Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times

"I love Tom Wolfe 'Whenever some big bizarro thing happens' I want the man in the white suit to do his usual exhausting reporting, turn the labels inside out and the hypocrites upside down . . .and tell me what's what in one of those jittering, dazzling riffs of his." --Maureen Dowd, The New York Times

"His fans will find plenty of evidence that Wolfe remains willing to plunge into 'the raw, raucous, lust-soaked rout that throbs with amped-up octophonic typanum all around [him]' and that--especially in his nonfiction--he can still grab the brass ring." --Publishers Weekly (starred)

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.