Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
About this audiobook
In these two devastatingly funny essays, Tom Wolfe examines political stances, social styles, "black rage," and "white guilt" in our status-minded world.
In "These Radical Chic Evenings," Wolfe focuses primarily on one symbolic event: a gathering of the politically correct at Leonard Bernstein's duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Black Panther Party. He re-creates the incongruous scene and its astonishing repercussions with high fidelity.
And in "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers," Wolfe travels to San Francisco to survey another meeting-ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment. This time the meeting deals with the newly emerging art of confrontation, as practiced by San Francisco's militant minorities in response to a highly bureaucratized poverty program.
With his fourth book, which brought the phrase "radical chic" into the cultural lexicon, Wolfe has never been more unflinching with his patented social criticism.
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About the author
Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of 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. As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York magazine, and is credited with coining the term, “The Me Decade.” Among his many honors, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University, graduating cum laude, and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He lived in New York City.
Harold N. Cropp is the artistic director of Commonweal Theatre Company and holds a BA in theater from Brown, an MBA from Santa Clara University, and an MFA in acting from the National Theatre Conservatory in Denver. He was the 2006 Sally Irvine Award winner for Initiative.
