Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers | Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe's two-act dissection of 1970s race relations in America is incisive and thought-provoking, an indispensable study in how white pieties have often worked against the interests of Black communities in the country.

Wolfe first takes readers back to his original hotbed of 1970s "radical chic" the party for the Black Panthers that Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, hosted at their Park Avenue penthouse. Wolfe's unerring eye for the uncanny feasts on an improbable scene that would morph into today's cocktail activism--well-heeled elites signifying their sympathy with causes related to Black emancipation through hobnobbing.

"Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers," meanwhile, unfolds on the other side of the country, in San Francisco's Office of Economic Opportunity, where Wolfe details with Kafkaesque absurdity the dysfunction, chaos, and corruption that waylays this outgrowth of the War on Poverty so that it inevitably ends up failing the underserved communities it's supposed to help. 

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, Wolfe was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and the 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.