Customer Reviews

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

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This is a collection of short tales about contemporary New York and America written in the early 1960s. As you might expect, Wolfe is a little more rough around the edges here, and so there is a little hit and miss. However, The Last American Hero, about driver Junior Johnson and the early beginnings of NASCAR, is breathtaking - here are the true buds of Wolfe's ideas on American Masculinity that were to flower in The Right Stuff.

Tom Wolfe began his career as a "New Journalist" with this book back in 1965, and when I discovered it some thirty years later I instantly became a fan of what this man is sellin'. The articles collected in here range a wide variety of topics, and even the duller pieces are punctuated with traces of brilliance.

The most memorable for me (seeing as I haven't read it in a few years) deal with some interesting and illuminating topics, both of their time and somehow relevant today:

The title piece dealing with custom cars (what's the hottest reality show staple besides weddings and home decor?)

Phil Spector's oddness (chilling in light of his recent legal troubles)

The beginnings of what would become NASCAR (now the biggest sport in the South)

Cassius Clay AKA Muhammed Ali (the role of the black athelete in American society is still being worked out)

Vegas' rise from the desert

There are countless others, products of their time and yet transcending eras to speak to us today. Again, not every piece works, but it's a credit to the book as a whole that I can't recall which ones were failures.

If you can find this, get it. You'll look at thinks differently afterwords...

Being a huge fan of the other two Tom Wolfe books I've read, "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and "A Man In Full", I was naturally curious to read Wolfe's first book. Unfortunately, I didn't find it to be as sharp or witty as his more recent work, possibly due to this one being non-fiction. I found it to essentially be a set of rambling observations about the state of life in America in the 60's. His choices of subject are clever and put a whole new spin on my view of the United States of the mid-twentieth century but on the whole I found large stretches of the book to be quite dry and, in my opinion, unnecessarily convoluted.

Curiously, I picked up a copy of this book right before Christmas. My wife gave me a copy of Boom! by Tom Brokaw for Christmas. I decided to read Tom Wolfe first. I call it the pre-sixties in my review title ... this is because so many people now think of the sixties in terms of the late sixties counter-culture. This books paints the underlayer of what was going on before all that hippie/stop-the-war/change-the-world/woodstock stuff even started. The revolution was already happening and we didn't even know it yet. Nostalgic? Not really. This is a glimpse into Wolfe developing that all-seeing Tom Wolfe inner eye to look past what was happening to see and describe what was REALLY happening. This is an amazing book, very vibrant and entertaining and as much a context piece as it is an historical artifact. You want to understand the sixties? Read this book as a primer.

In much of his work, TW explicitly mocks pretentious Easterners. Here, he accomplishes the same task by finding Kar Kustomizers. Las Vegas architects. Stock car drivers. Genuine culture creators all, who seek excellence unpretentiously, who are so far removed from Establishments definitions that they probably don't even hear the skitters echoing out from New York. Tom Wolfe returns some of the skitters to the Big Apple. And as you meet these very cool folks, I think you'll find the reflexive cynicism permeating so much of our mass media, and be refreshed at the vigor and genuine moral courage of America and its citizens.

These essays were the debut of a truly new voice. I not only did not know what to make of most of them when I first read them I really did not understand what the writer was getting at. But at the same time I saw they were filled with brilliant social observation, great wit, a certain humor and an effort at putting the phonys of this world down a peg. Like all really sharp social criticism these works have an element of cruelty in them. So let's say it is really a matter of taste that I did not like them so much. But as I said before it was clear to me then that the writer was tremendously inventive and that he was hitting many real targets in a strong and effective way.

If this is your first venture into the world of Wolfe this is a nostalgic reminder of the good old days and the nuances which accompanied the people and the celebrities of that time. Some the stories are samey with the customised car theme recurring but that can be lived with. Essentially it is just a compendium of his articles which were then published. Nothing fascinating in that. What is fascinating is that even though the book was written in the sixties many of his themes appear in his book 'The Bonfire Of The Vanities'. For example, there is an article on the obssessive nature of people and tailored clothes (see Sherman McCoy) and the nanny mafia (Kramer this time). The general theme is the study of the superficiality of human nature (which is the main social commentary evident in 'Bonfire'). This book on its one is a good read but is made a great read when read after or before 'Bonfire'

The subject of "Gonzo journalism", a journalistic literary trend started in the 1960s, and its most well-known practitioner, the late Doctor Hunter S. Thompson, has received much ink in this space over the past several years. The gist of this journalistic literary trend is that the writer gets "down and dirty" with whatever he or she is writing about and becomes an aspect of the story, one way or another. Now this notion set the traditionalists who worked under the so-called objectivist theory, "nothing but the facts, Jack" back on their heels. Of course, we all knew, and know, that this traditional approach was honored in the breech more than the observance and that old Hunter was merely rubbing everyone's face in it. However, Hunter Thompson was not the only one trying to got to "edge city" in his writing in what now has become, academically translated, called the "new journalism". The writer under review, Tom Wolfe, also tried in a less zany way to break out of the traditional mold as well.

While Thompson was more than happy to tweak "edge city" Brother Wolfe, by his whole social existence, and by something deep down in his training never really got all the way there. He never really pressed the issue of his own involvement in the story, nor would it perhaps have worked for him, but surely off of this early work he is onto something different from the run of the mill "straight" journalism of those days. Heck, even Hunter Thompson, argued, and argued strenuously, that most of his attempts at `gonzo" didn't work either. Here some of Wolfe's entries are brilliant, some much less so but that seems par for the course when one is experimenting with new forms.

For today's reader of this material it may be very, very hard to judge what Brother Wolfe was up to since, with few exceptions, most of the subject matter is very time-sensitive. Except maybe that "good old boy" piece he did on the legendary stock car racer Junior Johnson, "The Last American Hero." On that one he "kicked out the jams" to get the flavor of the social milieu that supported, and today still forms the core support of those stock car races. Another beauty of a story is the title one, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby", about the "hot rod' and customizing car craze and its culture among male teenagers that emerged after World War II. That sub-culture is still there, buried in the bushes, but in an age of computer-controlled cars that "mystique" has lost its edge.

If you have an interest about our "car culture" and want to know where it sprouted from, this is your book. Maybr Wolfe's best book, right up there with the "Kool Aid Acid Test". Remebering, laughing and learning, all at the same time is pretty cool.

Tom Wolfe has a special knack for seeing the everday things and giving them extra meaning. I always thought this ability was brought to the fore in this book, which surveys a wide variety of American institutions and personalities that, for me, epitomize much of the American experience since the end of WWII. I recommend it most often to foreigners (who always seem to be scratching their heads over what to make of this sweeping and boisterous land). I recommend it to any American who gets a kick out of America and Americana