Hooking Up

It is odd that the title essay in this collection by Tom Wolfe, which describes America at the turn of the millennium, seems musty and stale only a dozen years after publication, while Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (recently re-read) still comes off fresh as morning. The easy explanation is that Dos Passos is a far superior writer. Where Dos Passos collects facts and synthesizes, Wolfe collects facts and shows them off. The best things in this collection are two essays: on the microchip inventors, and on the "three stooges" who attacked Wolfe's A Man in Full.