During our VDARE.com Book Club discussion on The Bonfire of the Vanities, Steve Sailer argued that the book wasn’t the quintessential American novel. [Join the Book Club here, and listen to part of it below.]

In the Claremont Review of Books, Michael Anton discusses female characters in Tom Wolfe's books from the perspective of F. Roger Devlin's subversive thinking: Woman in Full By: Michael Anton Posted: May 29, 2015 ... Wolfe tells unwelcome truths about race, multiculturalism, modern art, masculinity, and much else. At least these get noticed. His heterodox... Read More

From the AP:As for the poor bastard Ms. Mangum is alleged to have stabbed to death this month, well, his problems are over, so let's get right back to Crystal's troubles.Okay, most of this article sounds like it was written by Oprah's friend Gayle, but the last line almost makes up for the rest:Even when... Read More

In the mid-1990s, Judge Richard Posner admitted that he hadn't thought much of Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. But, then, he changed his mind:Twenty-three years later, Bonfire is the gift that keeps giving. When I read august commentators assert: I open up my copy of Bonfire to Chapter 27, which is... Read More

For a number of years, it's been known that Tom Wolfe is writing a book about immigration set in Miami. For awhile, it was supposed to be published in 2009, then in 2010, and now in 2012. Wolfe will be over 80 by then, so, we'll see.The working title is Back to Blood, presumably based... Read More

David Denby, the lesser of the two New Yorker movie reviewers, has written a short book entitled Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation.The book doesn't sound terribly interesting, but part of Michael C. Moynihan's review in Reason caught my eye:Denby tags the Fox News screamer Bill O’Reilly as a boorish knuckle-dragger,... Read More

One of the odder figures in 20th Century American history was Sen. Joe McCarthy's chief counsel, Roy Cohn, whose infatuation with another McCarthy staffer, handsome young G. David Schine, was used by Dwight Eisenhower to destroy McCarthy in 1954. Cohn went on to become a prominent NYC shady attorney before dying of AIDS in 1986... Read More

Barack Obama has taken umbrage at Sarah Palin's lack of respect for the sacred profession of community organizer. To help explain what that widely-lauded but little understood job entails, here are excerpts from the classic 1970 work of sociology:Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchersby Tom WolfeGoing downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice... Read More

From the New York Times: Barnard at least admits that Bonfire of the Vanities didn't so much "reflect" as "predict" most of the events it now appears to have been based on: From the moment it was published in November 1987, new episodes in the drama of the metropolis seemed to unfold like cha

From one Virginian to another (in The Atlantic):Fortunately for America, as Jefferson saw it, British aristocracy had never taken root here in the colonies. Most British toffs didn’t have the faintest urge to depart their country estates and London clubs, their coaches-and-four, their tailors, valets, butlers, ballrooms, peruke-makers, and neck-cloth launderers for a wilderness full... Read More

By the way, perhaps I'm just being naive, but most of the vast amount of new construction on college and prep school campuses going up these days looks pretty good stylistically to my eyes, in contrast to the 1950-1980 Modernist eyesores nearby.Awhile ago I visited the Claremont Colleges, which consists of a few lovely Spanish... Read More