The Bonfire of the Vanities

This book arrived in new condition and was just as funny as when it first came out in the go-go 80's. It mocks Wall Street and Fifth Ave. excess. Tom Wolfe's best book!

It's always fun to read a best seller from almost 20 years ago, especially one that was proclaimed as something of a classic at the time. It's even more enjoyable to discover that Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities proves worthy of its acclaim even with the absence of cell phones, email and instant messaging. I mention the technology only because such communications dinosaurs as pay phones play significant roles in... Read Full Review

Tom Wolfe was once asked if the novel is dead. He replied that it's not quite dead, but it's on life support. He thinks the biggest problem with modern novels is that the novelists don't bother to do adequate research on their subject. How can one write a novel about India, for example, if one has never been to India? In Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe has done the research and has created an exact representation of modern... Read Full Review

I think that one of the most startling things about this novel is that, for everyone who reads it, there is a different pivotal image, a separate moment in the book which forms an axis for the work. For me, it's Sherman McCoy's phone conversation with his estranged wife, in which he talks about the days when, as he went off to work, he would turn on the street under the window where she was watching, and give the black power... Read Full Review

In *Bonfire of the Vanities*, pop journalist Wolfe takes a sneering satirical look (from a surprisingly European point of view) at American culture and all of its absurdities and obsessions. New York is treated as the microcosm of 80s America with all of its fads, rivalries, economic woes and class inequality mixing together uneasily and then exploding. Sherman McCoy, the supremely irritating central charater, is a fresh-faced... Read Full Review