The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

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.

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.

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.

This book is , like, cool. There is a lot of words that really speak to me, man. yeah

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.