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No Matter How Much You Promise . . .: A Symphonic Novel, by Edgardo Vega Yunqué

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An epic novel of jazz, race and the effects of war on an American family

This sweeping drama of intimately connected families --black, white, and Latino-- boldly conjures up the ever-shifting cultural mosaic that is America. At its heart is Vidamía Farrell, half Puerto Rican, half Irish, who sets out in search of the father she has never known. Her journey takes her from her affluent home to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where her father Billy Farrell now lives with his second family. Once a gifted jazz pianist, Billy lost two fingers in the Vietnam War and has since shut himself off from jazz.

In this powerful modern odyssey, Vidamía struggles to bring her father back to the world of jazz. Her quest gives her a new understanding of family, particularly through her half-sisters Fawn, a lonely young poet plagued with a secret, and Cookie, a sassy, streetsmart homegirl who happens to be "white." And when Vidamía becomes involved with a young African-American jazz saxophonist, she is forced to explore her own complex roots, along with the dizzying contradictions of race etched in the American psyche.

Edgardo Vega Yunqué vividly captures the myriad voices of our American idiom like a virtuoso spinning out a series of expanding riffs, by turns lyrical, deadly, flippant, witty, and haunting.

• Sales Rank: #3286991 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.95" h x 6.30" w x 9.30" l, 1.10 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 656 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Yunque's sprawling, old-fashioned debut, a multigenerational melting-pot epic set in New York City in the 1980s, is populated by a host of characters with patchwork identities: white, Puerto Rican, black, rich, poor. At the center of the tangled web is Puerto Rican-Irish Vidamia Farrell, daughter of upwardly mobile Elsa Santiago and Vietnam War vet Billy Farrell. Vidamia meets her father for the first time when she is 12 and discovers that she has two families: she lives with her strict mother and CPA stepfather in an affluent New York suburb, but she is powerfully drawn to her father's bohemian household on Manhattan's rough Lower East Side. Her father is a former jazz pianist whose career was cut short by the war, which cost him two fingers and his sanity. Vidamia is fascinated by his story and becomes fast friends with her stepsister Cookie, a dazzlingly blonde homegirl; when she is almost 17, she falls in love with Wyndell Ross, a black saxophonist. A multitude of secondary characters are fully developed: Elsa, Vidamia's mother, who struggles to leave the barrio behind; Fawn, Cookie's doomed poet sister; Maud, Billy's bar-owning Irish mother. The author's storytelling is unapologetically sentimental and rambling; his loving depiction of New York's Puerto Rican subculture reflects the full spectrum of city life. A brutal rape and a violent act of retaliation bring the novel to a sobering close, but Yunqu‚ (The Comeback, etc.) leaves his readers with a sense of hope and hard-won harmony.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Like its oversize title, this is the kind of novel that refuses to leave anything out. Vega Yunque seems determined to take D. H. Lawrence at his word and produce the "bright book of life," the whole messy sprawl of living and dying. He fails, of course, but in failing, he produces an almost hypnotically readable novel--about jazz, about race, about coming-of-age, and above all, about New York. The central character is Vidamia Farrell, half Puerto Rican, half Irish, who starts the book by looking for her father, then tries to save him, and along the way, attempts to understand all there is to understand about love, music, and racism. A tall order for a teenager, even an absurdly precocious one, so it's no surprise she needs a little help. Vega Yunque gives it to her in the form of a plethora of other characters and stories, stretching from Manhattan's East Village to Puerto Rico and the Appalachians and encompassing cameos from Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Darwin. The heart of the story, though, is Vidamia and her Irish father, Billy, piano prodigy and Vietnam vet, tortured by memories of the war and the wound that cost him his jazz career. When Vega Yunque isn't climbing on his own soapbox to declaim, Thackeray-like, on the virtues and shortcomings of his characters, he's propping those same characters up on their own soapboxes. But just as one's tolerance for such overweening verbiage grows thin, along comes a moment of such honest, wrenching emotion, free of all artifice, that we shrug our shoulders and plow on. Vega Yunque is an infuriating, utterly undisciplined writer, but he may just be the Thomas Wolfe of the multicultural twenty-first century. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Ed Vega . . . has appropriated English, making it imitate Spanish, jazz and street noise. He creates a fantasy community out of the materials of exile."
--The Village Voice

"In a prose that flows like life itself and makes reading an act as natural as singing or crying, Vega Yunqué amalgamates all --accents, skin colors, longings, obsessions, reciprocal mistrust, possibilities of connection, questions of identity. Situating his theme beyond racism, but also beyond its frigid, facile opposite, "political correctness," the author guides us solely by his finely tuned sense of what it is to be human. ‘Let the song sing you, honey’, one character says to another, giving us the key: Let the book read you. With this magnificent novel, that’s all you have to do."
--Laura Restrepo, author of Leopard in the Sun and The Dark Bride

"The 'perpetual war' we find ourselves in—from Sand Creek and the Civil War to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and the streets of New York City—is met head-on here with such unfashionable means as narrative, character, and emotion. Going in turns bitter and sweet against the grain of so much made-to-order fiction, Edgardo Vega Yunqué’s intricate and informed generosity of vision begins to render something like justice to our truncated, abbreviated, and categorized selves."
--Ammiel Alcalay, author of Memories of Our Future and After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture

"Masterfully crafted and complex, this coming of age tale of Vidamia Farrell is irresistible. Puerto Rican culture and its tangential connections to all that is Black and some that is White aims at the vortex of race in America. The many histories of our people are evoked by our music and sing like sinews of the body and leave the reader a bittersweet experience that rivals the strength of our own memories. I couldn't put it down and was saddened to leave the plethora of vital, cruel, loving, and questioning characters who I now feel as part of me. Absolutely amazing."
--Ntozake Shange, author of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf

"Not long ago we would hail Vidamia and her family as a contradiction. Today it dawns on us that it's the incumbent social construction of race, plaster falling like rain, that contradicts itself. I've tried to move minds to the light of this new day; Edgardo Vega Yunqué will move reader's hearts."
--Leon Wynter, author of American Skin

"Big, brave, boisterous and brawling, Edgardo Vega Yunqué comes out swinging from the first sentence and leaves us, by the end, in a perfect heap. What a title, what a family, what a sense of the city: this novel is a mythic embodiment of our times and a wonderful inventory of New York's human music."
--Colum McCann, author of This Side of Brightness and Dancer

"Edgardo Vega Yunqué has written one from the heart, a vivid, poignant book about love, loss, and family."
--Kevin Baker, author of Sometimes You See It Coming and Paradise Alley

Most helpful customer reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
An amazing symphony - if you can brave it!
By Kate C.
If you want to see the world from a different perspective, pick up this book and delve in today. I must admit the story is filled with such sadness and horror that I had difficulty making it to the ending, but as I had hoped the conclusion was filled with optimism and hope for the characters' futures.

The story follows the journey of a young girl named Vidamía Farrell, who is half Puerto Rican and half Irish, as she meets a father she has never known and discovers a family and identity she was completely unaware existed. Through her interaction with a number of characters with different backgrounds, and her interest in her own family lineage, Vidamía discovers a world view full of suffering and confusion, but one that is too real to deny. Another important character to the story is her father, Billy Farrell, who is physically and emotionally scarred from his experiences in Vietnam and the loss of his friend Joey Santiago. Billy struggles with his memories and guilt from the war and his inability to play jazz music as he once did.
In his novel, Edgardo Vega Yunqué jumps from one character to another through effortless connections, allowing the reader to see the thoughts of many different characters and hear their tales. These experiences shift from past to present and back again, creating a complete image of each person and all they have been through to make them who they are. Although these jumps tend to make the book seem scattered and at times confusing, the overall effect for the reader is worth the brief moments of confusion. Woven throughout the story is the theme of jazz music, which is used to express the sorrow of characters, to tell their stories, and help them recover from the traumas of the past. While I have never listened to a great deal of jazz music, the references to jazz in this book showed me the power of emotion that can be expressed through this channel and the struggles of the jazz musician.

After reflecting for several days and letting the scenes and characters settle in my mind, I realized that Yunqué had taken me on an amazing journey that dashed back and forth among characters, backwards and forwards in time, and from one perspective to another throughout the six hundred pages, ultimately teaching me a lesson in culture, diversity, and the suffering that none of us can escape in this life. Perhaps if the scenes had not been as powerful, this novel would not have moved me as it did and I now know the power contained within these pages will remain with me for a lifetime.
While I struggled to finish this book, worrying that the violent images would not allow me to sleep at night, the realization this book gave me was worth the struggle. It is clear that Yunqué planned for his book to have this effect on the reader. My own experiences perhaps helped me to have so much appreciation for this book. I grew up in a mostly white, wealthy suburban neighborhood, and there are many experiences that I have not lived through and many voices that I have not heard. There were very few Puerto Rican or African-American students in my school or neighborhood, and the only thing I knew about their struggles and culture is what I learned in school or saw on television. Since I began attending a university in Philadelphia, I feel I have gained a closer look into the lives of those who are different from me. Just today, I drove by several murals covering the sides of city buildings, dedicated to the lives of those African-Americans that have made an influence or simply faces that portray the struggles of everyday living. These murals brought me back to thinking about Yunqué's book, and the clarity it has given me in assessing such struggles. I have never been through many of the pains that others face, but through the characters in this novel I feel I have a much better understanding of the hardships others go through- a suffering that may be unique for each person, but is clearly present for everyone to face.
If you are ready for a shocking change in your own worldview, then pick up this book today. However, if you are not prepared to feel the pain of the characters and experience the hideous violence that these situations involve, then you should stay away from this book and its startling realities.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Reviewed as a literary work, not pop-comm
By Clay Ellis
Edgardo Vega Yunqué has written an epic of over six hundred pages about the lives of ordinary persons of the New York City he seems to intimately know and of the jazz music he obviously loves and the musicians who played it and brought it out of the backstreets and into the world. Though his characters are those whom you might find alongside you waiting for a subway his treatment of them is not ordinary. We see their hopes and fears and loves and failures just as we see around ourselves.
There is romance but there is no Priscilla Heatherwood who meets, and immediately hates, Lance Sterling whom she later learns has been misunderstood and falls in love with and has sex with him, not necessarily in that order, and they ride off into the bedroom of endless orgasms. His love scenes are written to further the story, not merely thrown in every fifteen pages to keep a bored housewife titillated.
One must reference the old as a benchmark to evaluate the new and I am reminded of Faulkner and Hemingway. Yunqué uses sentences as long as did Faulkner. The very first paragraph of the work uses ninety-nine words in only two sentences. When I read Faulkner I many times must reread and carefully parse each phrase of a sentence to learn what is the "meat" of it because Faulkner seemed to shake a handful of words from the dictionary and strew these across the page, hoping the jumble made sense and not caring if it truly did not. Yunqué's sentences are realized to be long only if one notes the punctuation. Whereas Faulkner's writing became so "way-out" that the reader's suspension of disbelief (a necessity for all fiction) was, itself, suspended, Yunqué's writing has not this defect.
Yunqué's characters and settings are those Hemingway might have chosen but Yunqué's style is one Hemingway should have chosen. When reading Hemingway the reader stomps short-concise-sentence by short-concise-sentence down the page and each detail gets its own subject-verb-predicate-period. Yunqué's details weave into sentences as just that: details.
Don't pick this book to read between Sunday dinner and supper. Plan on spending a few evenings with it. You'll be forced to not skim because Yunqué does switch between present and flashback and characters as easily as his `Ricans do with Español and English. If I want to find flaws in it I must cite this as the prime flaw.
It's obvious that Yunqué has experienced, or at least delved into, the life and locations of which he writes; and tells of it very well. I'll not give you a synopsis of the plot, buy the book to get that, but will tell you only that it centers around the life of a young girl of mixed heritage and her friends and family. It deals with subjects which many find uncomfortable to discuss, but discuss these anyway. He uses words and characterizations which are not politically correct but are true to life, though we don't want to admit it.
There are no great idealizations nor a message to the world; just slices of life in the real and the raw told in a manner to hold our interest. I recommend it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Zing! Went My Heartstrings
By Jason Yinger
To start with, I feel sorry for anyone who chooses not to read this novel based on some of the reviews posted about it. True, some of the scenes get to be a bit graphic at times, even uncomfortably so. Yet, for Yunque to have backed off would have robbed the reader of some vital touch of realness lacking in many authors, who are too chaste and concerned about what people will think to write what needs to be written. I find it ironic and more than a little sad to know that our society is one where we blithely glance over newspaper headlines of bombings and wars in foreign countries, as well as our own, and yet it is the subject matter of fictional novels which makes people rise up and shout: This is too much!
"No Matter How Much You Promise..." offers us a multifaceted view of the melting pot that is America. The novel, itself a fusion of ideas and sounds, ex-plores the connection between one girl and the Puerto Rican, American, Irish, and African American cultures which course through her veins. At times Vidamia seems invincible, armed with her goldcard (a 25,000 dollar limit) and her sassy P.R. attitude, but then a door opens for a moment and we catch a private glance of the struggle going on inside her.

Vital to the novel is the rich tradition of music that Yunque weaves into the story. From the Farrell family subway band, to Pop Butterworth's forgotten musical career, to Billy Farrell's own marred Jazz talent and more, music reaches into every aspect of the characters' lives. To read the novel without the accompaniment of the selections referred to within the story is like eating a sandwich without bread: you can still eat the contents without the bread, but obviously something is lacking. If nothing else, this novel should leave you with a greater appreciation for Jazz and related music.

The other draw to "No Matter How Much You Promise..." is the emotional rollercoaster that Yunque drags the reader onto. Personally, I was brought to a bout of weeping (as well as a night or two of subdued contemplation), the likes of which I have never experienced from a novel. I found Yunque's characterization of the 'Four Horsemen of Avenue B' as `a twisted quartet of perverted junior ex-ecutives of evil' to be horrifyingly perfect. There are no changes of heart or character here, they maintain their inherent evil all the way to the bitter (and I mean bitter) end. But don't be deterred by such emotional outbursts, as the story offers just as many high points as low. One section in particular will, if nothing else, crack a smile on your face, as Pop Butterworth harangues no one in particular with a wonderfully amusing (if not slightly blasphemous) sermon on the true account of the creation of man.
By the end of this novel, you will have wept with horror as well as with joy. You will never look at music, family, or yourself in the same way. While Yunque may get unnecessarily preachy at times, dealing with race, his symphonic narrative strives to touch your heart; and it does, over and over again.

See all 18 customer reviews...

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## PDF Download An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America, by Henry Wiencek

PDF Download An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America, by Henry Wiencek

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A major new biography of Washington, and the first to explore his engagement with American slavery

When George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves was his "only unavoidable subject of regret." In this groundbreaking work, Henry Wiencek explores the founding father's engagement with slavery at every stage of his life--as a Virginia planter, soldier, politician, president and statesman.

Washington was born and raised among blacks and mixed-race people; he and his wife had blood ties to the slave community. Yet as a young man he bought and sold slaves without scruple, even raffled off children to collect debts (an incident ignored by earlier biographers). Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields where he commanded both black and white troops, Washington's attitudes began to change. He and the other framers enshrined slavery in the Constitution, but, Wiencek shows, even before he became president Washington had begun to see the system's evil.

Wiencek's revelatory narrative, based on a meticulous examination of private papers, court records, and the voluminous Washington archives, documents for the first time the moral transformation culminating in Washington's determination to emancipate his slaves. He acted too late to keep the new republic from perpetuating slavery, but his repentance was genuine. And it was perhaps related to the possibility--as the oral history of Mount Vernon's slave descendants has long asserted--that a slave named West Ford was the son of George and a woman named Venus; Wiencek has new evidence that this could indeed have been true.

George Washington's heroic stature as Father of Our Country is not diminished in this superb, nuanced portrait: now we see Washington in full as a man of his time and ahead of his time.

• Sales Rank: #962314 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.24" h x 1.45" w x 6.18" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

Features

• Henry Wiencek
• Presidents
• American History

Amazon.com Review
Was George Washington a dedicated slaveholder and, like Thomas Jefferson, a father of slave children? Or was he a closeted abolitionist and moralist who abhorred the abuse of African-Americans? In An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America Henry Wiencek delves into Washington's papers and new oral history information to assemble a portrait of the first President of the United States that (while uneven in the telling) concludes that Washington supported emancipation by the time of his death.

To begin, Wiencek briefly addresses and dismisses the claim that Washington fathered a child with Venus, (a slave owned by Washingtong's brother, John Augustine). According to Wiencek, the President was likely sterile and such an affair would have been out of character for a man who prided himself on "self-control."

Wiencek's real focus in An Imperfect God is Washington's personal and political position regarding emancipation. The primary ground for Wiencek's argument is Washington's will and a selection of private letters that elaborate a plan for providing land and means for his freed laborers. The will in particular offers powerful evidence of Washington's true intentions, including explicit declarations manumitting Washington's slaves after his death. As Wiencek shows, the document punctuated a long period of equivocation.

An Imperfect God is an imperfect book. Wiencek's occasional first-person accounts of his field research, including discussions with descendants of Washington, feel strangely out of place in what is elsewhere a straightforward biography punctuated with digressions into Washington's larger historical context. Further, Wiencek sometimes dabbles in hagiography and is willing to excuse much in a man who was a slaveholder his entire life. Yet, Wiencek is right to point out the distinctions of Washington among the slaveholding Founding Fathers. Readers can only imagine along with Wiencek the national tragedy that could have been averted had Washington provided the great example of emancipation while in office. --Patrick O'Kelley

From Publishers Weekly
This important work, sure to be of compelling interest to anyone concerned with the nation's origins, its founders and its history of race slavery, is the first extended history of its subject. Wiencek (who won a National Book Critics Circle award for The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White) relates not only the embrangled "blood" history of Washington's family and that of the Custis clan into which he married, but also the first-person tale, often belabored, of his own search for facts and truth. What will surely gain the book widest notice is Wiencek's careful evaluation of the evidence that Washington himself may have fathered the child of a slave. His verdict? Possible, but highly improbable. Yet his detective work places the search on a higher plane than ever before. Also, while being a social history (unnecessarily padded in some places) of 18th-century Virginia and filled with affecting stories of individual slaves, the book stands out for depicting Washington's deep moral struggle with slavery and his gradual "moral transfiguration" after watching some young slaves raffled off. While by no means above dissimulation, even lying, about his and Martha's bond servants, by the time of his death in 1799 Washington had become a firm, if quiet, opponent of the slave system. By freeing his slaves upon Martha's death, he stood head and shoulders above almost all his American contemporaries. This work of stylish scholarship and genealogical investigation makes Washington an even greater and more human figure than he has seemed before. History Book Club main selection.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Thomas Jefferson is revered as our apostle of liberty; yet, when he died deeply in debt, he had made no provision for the emancipation of his slaves, and many were sold and families scattered. George Washington was conservative, authoritarian, and aristocratic in outlook and demeanor; yet, he strongly emphasized in his will that his slaves were to be freed, despite opposition from his family. Wiencek, a Virginia historian, studies Washington's moral struggle with the institution of slavery. As Wiencek's fascinating and often emotionally wrenching examination of Washington's private correspondence reveals, he expressed distaste for slavery as a young man. But like many similarly minded Virginia planters, he was not prepared to advocate emancipation. As commander of the Continental Army, Washington was deeply moved by the sight of black slaves and free men fighting alongside whites, which seems to have accelerated his personal opposition to what he regarded as a curse. Unfortunately, like Jefferson, his personal opposition could not spur him to lead a public campaign that might have spared the nation the horrors to come. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Most helpful customer reviews

48 of 49 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating, not cynical, appraisal of American Patriarch
By A Customer
I received this book as a Christmas gift, and was afraid it might be a cynical and politically-correct portrait of George Washington. Far from it.
Washington was probably the only man who could have steered us between the rock of tyranny and the whirlpool of anarchy. And when his second term was up, "the man who refused to be king" got on his horse and returned to his beloved farm. Mount Vernon, however, was a house divided when it came to dealing with the corrupting institution of slavery. Martha Washington and the extended family had radically different views from the patriarch, who wanted to begin educating the slaves.
It is soul-wrenching to read of the missed opportunities to stymie slavery. The Founding Fathers had the power to bring our way of life into greater consonance with our sublime rhetoric of liberty. If George Washington had freed his slaves while in office, rather than after his death, it would have created an implacable precedent for his successors.
Thomas Jefferson was a genius (George Will called him the "Man of the Millenium"), but it's appropriate that his stock should go down a bit in recent years -- and Founding Fathers such as John Adams and George Washington should be re-discovered and re-treasured. Henry Wiencek has a fascinating section about Phillis Wheatley, poet and slave. The reader can only be stunned by Jefferson's hostility toward her, contrasted with Washington's openness.
The chapter on Williamsburg is superb. Jefferson called the colonial capital "the finest school of manners and morals that ever existed in America." Williamsburg had the first theater in the British colonies. The same royal governor who designed Williamsburg, earlier had laid out Annapolis. The author makes you feel like you're walking the broad expanse of Duke of Gloucester Street and "looking down the vistas of the past."
One learns many things from Henry Wiencek. For instance, President Washington told Secretary of State Randolph that if the Union ever split, "he had made up his mind to remove and be of the Northern [side]." (As the fiery clouds of secession rolled in, and Lincoln tried to convince Robert E. Lee -- married to the Washingtons' great-granddaughter -- to take command of the Northern armies, was either man aware of the Founder's remark?)
The book's frontispiece map of "Washington's Virginia" is the only off-key note. The editors overlooked the fact that Mount Vernon and Alexandria have been magically transplanted from the west bank of the Potomac to the east bank.
I loved this book! I tip my hat to Mr. Wiencek, who penned these words in the acknowledgments: "I close with an old Virginia toast, heartfelt: `God bless General Washington.'"

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Washington and America's Original Sin - A Cautionary Tale
By Theo Logos
The troubling and uncomfortable subject of America's slave owning founders is a difficult one with which to deal, and one that many Americans would prefer to ignore altogether. The idea that men we have come to view as great and noble could on the one hand stake their lives and honor on the cause of freedom and liberty for "all" men, and on the other exclude an entire race that they held in bondage for their own profit is a huge contradiction that does not easily fit into the ideal American mythos that we have learned to revere. Never the less, it is important to face it, own it as part of our history, and begin to understand the meaning and consequences of this stain on the American ideal.

In `An Imperfect God', Henry Wiencek examines this question by focusing on the foremost founder - George Washington. In Washington, he detects a clear evolution of thought. He shows us Washington the young man who seemingly accepted the institution without question; the mature man who clearly began to question it on moral and ethical grounds, and the old man who found it morally repugnant, and against the wishes of his family, emancipated all of his slaves in his will, making him unique among the slave owning founders.

Wiencek recreates the world that Washington was born into, showing us the context of his thought and action. He explains the social system of the great landed plantation owners, whose wealth and prestige were built upon human slavery. He is unsparing in his depiction of an institution that often led to shared blood ties between masters and slaves, so that many masters held in bondage their own children, grandchildren, brothers and sisters, and reveals that some of the slaves held at Mt. Vernon were blood relatives of Martha Washington. And he makes it clear, not from the judgment of our own times, but from Washington's and other founder's own words that they were aware of the great moral evil of this vile institution. He shows us the great change in attitude that Washington experienced over the course of his lifetime, from a young man so hardened to the evils of the institution that he helped to run a lottery that raffled off Black children to pay a friend's debts, to the old man who, after many missed opportunities, wrote a remarkable will ten months before his death to free and care for all of his slaves, repudiating in death the evil system he was never able to directly confront during his life.

Wiencek writes of Washington with respect. He does not attempt to attack the greatness of the man, but to show us how even the noble of spirit can fail to act in the face of institutionalized evil. The failure of Washington and the other founders to eradicate slavery in their new land of liberty led directly to the terrible Civil War (an event which both Washington and Jefferson anticipated), and the continuing consequences of their failure still haunt us today. As such, `An Imperfect God' is a cautionary tale for our contemplation.

This should not be the first or the only book that you read on George Washington - it would not present a balanced picture of the man. Yet the dark history that it details is important, and is ignored at our peril. Knowing this, the greatest failure of the founding generation is as important to a full understanding of America as is knowledge of their tremendous achievements, and only by facing the inherent contradiction of the two can we move on to build a better America for future generations.

Theo Logos

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Engaging, Informative, Imperfect
By Amazon Customer
I enjoyed An Imperfect God because the writing itself was excellent. Although the author veered back and forth between first person observations to a more biographical stance, he managed to engage my attention with his well woven historical references and his ancedotal stories which had a very personal feel.
There were places where the author seemed to rehash stories told by others without adding anything new, and other places where his scholarship was fresh and his conclusions provoke conversation. Wiencek shows us repeatedly the paradox of a man who benefited by owning slaves and their labor, who came to a point of understand the the corrupting influence of absolute power slavery geve owners over the lives of others. Washington allowed arrangements between slaves and their owner/relatives within his own household which we would find untenable at best, and the subject of offensive jokes at worst. The story of Martha Washington's slave sister and Martha's son from her first marriage, which produced a child, is one which would be considered unpalatable in these days but was commonplace in the 17th century until the end of legal slavery. Yet, at the end of his life, he provided for the manumission of his slaves.
Clearly, Wiencek is not a revisionist historian, in the way that most traditional historians use the term. He is a revisionist in the best sense of the word, adding to our knowledge as well as encouraging us to look at viewpoints we might not have considered.
In the end, however, Wiencek's book provides a fresh look at a difficult time and convoluted relationships which have had scant acknowledgement outside the African American community. As our nation finally comes to grips with recent revelations that 20th century segregationist Strom Thurmon fathered a daughter with a black house maid in the early 20th century, we see that Thurmon's behavior is merely an extention of the behavior exhibited in the 1700s by other leaders. Timely, indeed.

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? Fee Download Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino, by Emily W. Leider

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From the author of Becoming Mae West—an in-depth look at the Silver-Screen legend who forever changed America’s idea of the leading man

Tango pirate, gigolo, powder puff, Adonis—all have been used to describe the silent-film icon known as Rudolph Valentino. From his early days as a taxi dancer in New York City to his near apotheosis as the ultimate Hollywood heartthrob, Rudolph Valentino (often to his distress) occupied a space squarely at the center of controversy. In this thoughtful retelling of Valentino’s short and tragic life—the first fully documented biography of the star—Emily W. Leider looks at the Great Lover’s life and legacy, and explores the events and issues that made him emblematic of the Jazz Age. Valentino’s androgynous sexuality was a lightning rod for fiery and contradictory impulses that ran the gamut from swooning adoration to lashing resentment. He was reviled in the press for being too feminine for a man; yet he also brought to the screen the alluring, savage lover who embodied women’s darker, forbidden sexual fantasies.

In tandem, Leider explores notions of the outsider in American culture as represented by Valentino’s experience as an immigrant who became a celebrity. As the silver screen’s first dark-skinned romantic hero, Valentino helped to redefine and broaden American masculine ideals, ultimately coming to represent a graceful masculinity that trumped the deeply ingrained status quo of how a man could look and act.

• Sales Rank: #427443 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.69" h x 6.44" w x 9.32" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 592 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Leider exhaustively details the life of one Hollywood's first heartthrobs, who was born Rodolfo Guglielmi in 1895 in Apulia, Italy. After being dismissed from several schools for poor grades, Valentino left for Paris in 1913; months later, he found his way to New York: "unlike most of his emigrating countrymen, he not was escaping chronic family poverty but rather his own track record and the sense of defeat it had helped create." Valentino became a "taxi dancer," teaching society women how to dance, before beginning his career as a film actor. In 1917, fleeing New York to again redefine himself, Valentino went to Los Angeles. Leiter explains, with particulars that greatly inform but sometimes overwhelm, how Valentino-after a disastrous marriage to lesbian actress Jean Acker-landed his first feature in 1921, The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. His persona of the smoldering, exotic lover took hold with this film, and later that year with The Son of the Sheik. In 1936, after undergoing surgery for acute appendicitis, Valentino died from infection at age 31. Leider subtly discusses Valentino's sexuality without exploiting it, and wonderfully weaves in his voice (in separating himself from Sheik's portrayal of Arabs, Valentino says: "People are not savages because they have dark skins"). Photos.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Although today's moviegoers may not have seen Rudolph Valentino on screen, "they've probably seen his silhouette on packs of Sheik condoms," Leider says, exuding what screenwriter June Mathis called the "smoldering quality" of "a brutish cabaret parasite." In Leider's sprawling biography, Valentino retains the carefully crafted and projected aura of mystery he enjoyed during his mercurial career--and then some. Born Rodolfo Guglielmi in a little southern Italian town, Valentino had a largely undocumented childhood, which Leider fills out, along with the rest of Valentino's early days, with the kind of might-have/must-have/could-have speculation that Edmund Morris applied to Ronald Reagan. No imaginary friends are introduced, but Leider does go on about such matters as how Rudy reacted to Nijinsky's L'Apres-midi d'un faune, because, well, who's to say he didn't see it? Later she deals with Valentino's gender-bending celluloid masculinity, his highly dramatic relationships with the likes of notorious Blavatskyite Natacha Rambova, and his flair for the occult. A comprehensive, if not necessarily crystal-clear, portrait of the great screen lover. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Rich and definitive . . . a timeless [story told] with grace, wit, and empathy." --Vanity Fair

"A fluid, accomplished, deliciously readable biography of the individual who . . . 'helped deflower postwar America.' " --Barry Gewen, The New York Times Book Review

"The continuing fascination with Rudolph Valentino, and the sheer mystique that the name conjures up, is difficult to comprehend. It is almost incredible that at the start of the twenty-first century, an actor who died at the dawn of the last century should sustain the imaginations of such a large number of individuals. Emily Leider helps to dispel all of the myths generated through the years, documents his life and career with elegant accuracy, and does much to record and explain Valentino's complex sexuality. The image of Valentino that was held by his contemporaries and that has endured to this day was one of fable and fantasy. Dark Lover is the first biography to shed the welcome light of reality on to that image."
-Anthony Slide, author of Silent Players: A Biographical and Autobiographical Study of 100 Silent Film Actors and Actresses

"Emily Leider's exhaustively researched biography of Valentino places the man, the career, and the legend in broad contexts that extend from the birth of the Hollywood studio system to social issues of ethnicity and gender."
-Charles Affron, author of Lillian Gish

"Rudolph Valentino's short, sad life unfolds beautifully in this scrupulously detailed biography. Emily W. Leider links the actor's erotically complex image to themes of celebrity, virility and race that are as gripping today as they were in the age of silent film."
-Eileen Whitfield, author of Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood

"Dark Lover is a compulsive read. Emily Leider's research into the life of Rudolph Valentino is astonishing and the authority with which she tells the story is admirable."
-Kevin Brownlow

"A beautifully researched biography that will doubtless stand as the definitive account of Valentino's legendary career."
-James Curtis, author of James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters

"Sensitively reasoned and meticulously researched, Dark Lover is the definitive Valentino biography."
-David Stenn, author of Clara Bow

Most helpful customer reviews

59 of 62 people found the following review helpful.
Leider Has A Few Tricks Up Her Sleeve
By G.I Gurdjieff
I have read so many books on Rudy Valentino that my first instinct was to pass on this. I was sure no one could do much with the life of an actor who has been dead nearly 77 years. Fool that I am, I figured I'd give it a cursory look/see and probably put it down in quick order and move on to better things.
The shocker here is that this is really one of the best biographies I've picked up in a very long time and it has as much to do with the writer/researcher as it does with the subject itself.
This is no rehash of the same tired Rudy V. stories that have been perpetuated since his death. It contains a lot of fresh material and new insights into the personality and public persona of Valentino.
Leider is the rare combination of gifted biographer and tireless researcher. In the process of writing this book, she managed to really get down to the bare bones of her subject. She managed to do this while creating a mood and setting for all the action. In other words, she seemed to really understand the environment under which Valentino and all the other early screen stars worked and flourished in.
Where as other Valentino biographers seem to spit out questionable or unsubstantiated "facts", Ms. Leider to the best of her ability deals honestly with the material given her and attempts to authenticate information to the best of her ability and she deals honestly with rumors and innuendos and labels them as such.
One aspect of Leider's research that I found particularly interesting is that she not only researched her subject, but also the secondary players who interacted with Valentino during his life. She developed full profiles of people such as Pola Negri, Natacha Rambova, George Ullman......people who interacted with Valentino and were important components in the story of his life.
I am a huge fan of Jean Harlow and Clara Bow's biographer David Steen. Now Emily Leider also has my admiration. She and Steen have set a standard for celebrity biographers to follow.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
What a celebrity biography should be
By Anyechka
This is everything a good celebrity biography should be--scholarly, thoroughly researched, entertaining, insightful, giving detailed profiles of people who were very important in the star's life instead of just focusing on the subject himself, and giving off the genuine feel that the writer really has respect for her subject. Too many celebrity biographies, sadly, are little more than tabloids, reporting every bit of gossip as undisputed fact, even if there's zero evidence, repeating the same old unverified or exaggerated anecdotes, and giving credence to misinformation provided by questionable sources, many of whom have some sort of agenda. Ms. Leider's book is nothing like the type of sleaze churned out by people such as Geoffrey Giuliano and the late Albert Goldman. It's easy to fall into a trap of writing a sensationalised account when you're dealing with a star about whom there's been so much misinformation, gossip, and outright slander for so many decades, but she rises above that and reports only the truth (though of course people who have long cherished and believed in said gossip aren't going to be too happy their longtime fantasies are discredited).

There were a couple of tidbits in this book I found to be a little too much information, but even those things were presented in a tasteful and respectful way, not just put in there to be to shocking or sensational. There were also a lot of great pictures, and a LOT of sources listed in the back to go to for additional information (books, magazine articles, websites, etc.). Having heard that this book was very positively and heartily endorsed at the annual memorial service on Valentino's Jarhzeit (death anniversary), I was sold on reading it. And since this book has been written, happily, 'Beyond the Rocks' is no longer a lost film as it's reported in these pages. It's the perfect combination of scholarly research, lively storytelling, and genuine respect and love for the biographer's subject.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
Emily W. Leider strikes again!
By Gwen Chabot Muir
Anyone can write a biography of a film star. However not everyone's efforts are worth the time to read or the money spent. Luckily, Emily W. Leider is one of a rare breed, a writer who truly respects her subjects. DARK LOVER: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF RUDOLPH VALENTINO doesn't give into the all too easy route of sexy gossip combined with careless writing.
Rudolph Valentino, like Leider's previous subject Mae West, radiated sex, sin and sensuality from the silver screen even to this day. DARK LOVER explores Valentino's youth in Italy, his early years in America, his peak as a Hollywood love god and his tragic death at the age of 31.
Under the costumes and behind the smoldering eyes was a man seeking love and family even as he make some disasterous life choices. Case in point, Valentino's two marriages to women who for their own reasons were light years away from the Madonna of the Hearth Valentino longed for.
The end result is a beautifully researched and fully fleshed portrait. Even buying DARK LOVER for the pictures alone is well worth the cover price for the evolution from gawky Italian boy to Hollywood legend.
If you have an unlimited book budget or save your pennies for books, DARK LOVER is a must have for the Hollywood fanatic.

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Dupont University--the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition . . . Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.

As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus--she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.
With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler.

• Sales Rank: #297381 in Books
• Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Published on: 2004-11-09
• Released on: 2004-11-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.21" h x 1.44" w x 6.14" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 688 pages

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• Great product!

Amazon.com Review

Amazon.com Exclusive Content

: Dupont University--the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition... Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.

As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus--she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives. With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler.

Tom Wolfe Talks About I Am Charlotte Simmons
In I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe masterfully chronicles college sports, fraternities, keggers, coeds, and sex--all through the eyes of the titular Simmons, a bright and beautiful freshman at the fictional Dupont University. Listen to an Amazon.com exclusive audio clip of Wolfe talking about his new novel.

Listen to Tom Wolfe Talk About I Am Charlotte Simmons

Tom Wolfe Timeline

1931: Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr. born in Richmond, VA, on March 2. Wolfe later attends Washington and Lee University (BA, English, 1951), and Yale University (Ph.D., American Studies, 1957).

1956: Wolfe begins working as a reporter in Springfield, MA, Washington, D.C., then finally New York City, writing feature articles for major newspapers, as well as New York and Esquire magazines. Not satisfied with the conventions of newspaper reporting at the time, Wolfe experiments with using the techniques of fiction writing in his news articles. Wolfe's newspaper career spans a decade.

1963: After being sent by Esquire to research a story about the custom car world in Southern California, Wolfe returns to New York with ideas, but no article. Upon telling his editor he cannot write it, the editor suggests he send his notes and someone else will. Wolfe stays up all night, types 49 pages, and turns it in the next morning. Later that day, the editor calls to tell Wolfe they are cutting the salutation off the top of the memorandum, printing the rest as-is. Thus, New Journalism was arguably born, whereby writing and storytelling techniques previously utilized only in fiction were radically applied to nonfiction. Straight reporting pieces now were free to include: the author's perceptions and experience, shifting perspectives, the use of jargon and slang, the reconstruction of events and conversations.

1965: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux publish Wolfe's first collection of nonfiction stories displaying his newfound reporting techniques: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The book cements Wolfe's place as a prominent stylist of the New Journalism movement.

1968: The Pump House Gang and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (No. 91 on National Review's 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century) publish on the same day, and together provide an up-close portrait and exploration of the hippie culture of the 1960s (by following the novelist Ken Kesey and his entourage of LSD enthusiasts), and the cultural change occurring at a seminal point in U.S. social history.

1970: Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is published. This collection underscores racial divide in America, including an am using story about the socialites of New York City seeking out black liberation groups as guests, focusing on the conductor Leonard Bernstein's party with the Black Panthers in attendance at his Park Avenue duplex. (No. 35 on National Review's 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century .)

1976: Wolfe labels the 1970s "The Me Decade" in his collection of essays, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. Wolfe illustrates the bookthroughout.

1979: The Right Stuff is published. Depicting the status, structure, exploits, and ethics of daredevil pilots at the forefront of rocket and aircraft technology, as well as the beginnings of the space program and the pioneering NASA astronauts who were the first Americans to land on the moon, the book receives the National Book Award in 1980. An Academy Award-winning film is made from the book in 1983.

1987: With publication of his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities--serialized in Rolling Stone magazine--Wolfe pens one of the bestselling and definitive novels of the 1980s, continuing his social criticism and ability to capture the lives and preoccupations of Americans, one generation at a time. Wolfe receives a record $5 million for movie rights to the novel and, despite the success of the book, the film fails at the box office.

1998: A Man in Full, Wolfe's second novel, is published to mixed criticism, yet garners favor as a 1998 National Book Award Finalist. Here, Wolfe aims his sights on the Atlanta, GA, elite, trophy wives, and real estate developers, continuing to comment on racial issues and the chasm in socioeconomic status in America.

2000: Hooking Up, a collection of essays, reviews, profiles, and the novella, Ambush at Fort Bragg, is published.

2004: On November 9, Wolfe's third novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, set at the fictional Dupont University, is published.

From Publishers Weekly
What New York City finance was to Wolfe in the 1980s and Southern real estate in the '90s, the college campus is in this sprawling, lurid novel: a flashpoint for cultural standards and the setting for a modern parable. At elite Dupont (a fictional school based on Wolfe's research at places like Stanford and Michigan), the author unspools a standard college story with a 21st-century twist—jocks, geeks, prudes and partiers are up to their usual exploits, only now with looser sexual mores and with the aid of cell phones. Wolfe begins, as he might say, with a "bango": two frat boys tangle with the bodyguard of a politician they've caught in a sex act. We then race through plots involving students' candy-colored interactions with each other and inside their own heads: Charlotte, a cipher and prodigy from a conservative Southern family whose initiation into dorm life Wolfe milks to much dramatic advantage; Jojo, a white basketball player struggling with race, academic guilt and job security; Hoyt, a BMOC frat boy with rage issues; Adam, a student reporter cowed by alpha males. As in Wolfe's other novels, characters typically fall into two categories: superior types felled by their own vanity and underdogs forced to rely on wiles. But what in Bonfire of the Vanities were powerful competing archetypes playing out cultural battles here seem simply thin and binary types. Wolfe's promising setup never leads to a deeper contemplation of race, sex or general hierarchies. Instead, there is a virtual recitation of facts, albeit colorful ones, with little social insight beyond the broadly obvious. (Athletes getting a free pass? The sheltered receiving rude awakenings?) Boasting casual sex and machismo-fueled violence, the novel seems intent on shocking, but little here will surprise even those well past their term-paper years. Wolfe's adrenalized prose remains on display—e.g., a basketball game seen from inside a player's head—and he weaves a story that comes alive with cinematic vividness. But, like a particular kind of survey course, readers are likely to breeze through these pages—yet find themselves with little to show for it.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Not since the days of the manifesto-happy Surrealists has a writer declared his intention to dazzle with such hip-waggling brio as Tom Wolfe. In the sixties, he advertised a "New Journalism," full of narrative punch and "status detail." (Shades from Defoe to Liebling were curious to learn of these new developments.) Then, in 1989, Wolfe wrote an essay that called for a rambunctious, muscular new "social novel" to embrace the carnival of American life. By now it's plain that Wolfe's fiction, while often featuring hilarious set-pieces of social embarrassment and lubricious yearning, is no match for the best of his journalism, which is still as fizzy as when it was first uncorked. The latest novel, his third, is the weakest—saddled with the familiar leering terminology ("loamy loins," "stiffened giblet") but containing no news more startling than that college students are erotically overheated and intellectually distracted. When Wolfe's reporting is dated, his fiction, for all its energy, seems stalled—an engine roaring in park.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Most helpful customer reviews

125 of 137 people found the following review helpful.
A Fun Read on an Apparently Controversial Subject
By M. Goldner
Poor Tom Wolfe. He writes infrequently, and readers apparently bring a lot of baggage to his work, based on the reviews above and on the universality of the subject he covers here.

Whether or not you feel like Wolfe accurately captures college life in the 21st century, one thing is for sure: Wolfe writes with more flair and color than any of his contemporaries. Like his other work, I Am Charlotte Simmons is engrossing, very funny at times and a real page turner. Certainly I found a lot here that reminded me of my college days, and Wolfe does a great job of capturing the different elements of campus life, elements that largely transcend the specific jargon and events of any specific decade.

Whereas I was highly disappointed with the end of A Man In Full (although I loved the rest of the book), I Am Charlotte Simmons has a truer, better conclusion, and is well worth the investment. If you're a fan of Tom Wolfe, you won't be disappointed. If you're not a fan of Tom Wolfe, and you like to read, you need to check him out. I'd probably start with The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities, but basically you can't go wrong.

I Am Charlotte Simmons is a welcome addition to the Wolfe canon, and don't let the negative reviews here sway you; as someone else has noted, even bad Wolfe is better than 99% of everything else out there.

52 of 55 people found the following review helpful.
Eye-opening social commentary of modern college life
By USAF Veteran
Many of the college-age reviewers miss the mark completely. They get hung up on what brand of jeans they wear at their school and what music their "cool" group listens to. They completely lack the perspective to see what Wolfe is getting at - our best and brightest have been surrendered to a system that is anarchy intent only on drugs, sex, and sporting and popular culture.

Some have criticized the amount of play sports are given in the novel. In many colleges, the first and often only thing out of the mouth of many students (if you can find one sober on a Friday night) is the current state of the sports team active at that time of the year. Every year, colleges from Washington and Lee (Wolfe's alma mater and a top-10 party school) to BYU (stone-cold sober top 10) have their current crop of athletes-gone-wild who are cheating in school, raping co-eds, and getting caught driving while on drugs. Wolfe also nails the attitudes and thinking of many athletes and athletic programs. Sure, there are exceptions, but not as many as you think.

And the emphasis on drinking and sex is right on target. I recently attended an Illinois/Michigan football game with a nephew. I crashed in his student apartment and then walked to the game Saturday AM. The streets were littered with used condoms, empty alcohol bottles, half-naked students covered with vomit, and expensive SUV's parked crazily. Being of bookish bent, I swung by the library and found this beautiful facility as quiet as a tombstone - and as empty as the alcohol bottles in the stadium parking lot. Watch some spring break program on TV or rent girls-gone-wild (which I swear I have never done) and you will get the picture.

Wolfe also hits a home-run (See, I told you sports pervades our culture) with his portrayal of pretentious pseudo-intellectuals who posture and pretend that their foul behavior is justified because they are so much better than the rest of the herd. And many of them seek just as hard as the jocks to be drunk, laid, and admired and feared by everyone else. Wolfe enjoys skewering these people. I must admit I enjoy the occasional joust with half-witted Marxist feminists just for kicks myself. (I'll bet you didn't know that Marx viewed females as nothing more than prostitutes. Ask what that means to the next Marxist feminist you encounter and watch them go ballistic. Offer them 10 dollars and watch them really go ballistic.)

The co-ed dorm life is also accurate. 18 year olds are too stupid to see that you really don't want to share bathrooms with the opposite sex. You don't really want to share a bathroom at all, come to think of it. Those of us who are veterans will recall how much fun it was sitting on a row of 10 cut-out plywood holes knee to knee with 10 others during the few minutes between reveille and the time to report. Why any fool would purposely seek such a situation with the opposite sex demonstrates that 18 year olds should have no say whatsoever in their housing arrangements.

Charlotte is not the perfect heroine and lots of her thinking is shallow and selfish, just like all of us at sometime in our younger years. Her sexual encounter is not the point of this book. The point is learning what kind of a world exists in college and compromising with this world and her previous search for a "life of the mind" (as the author puts it).

This book is not for anyone younger than 35 due to the graphic and repetitive language. On second thought, make it 45. This patois of profanity is all too prevalent, even in our junior-high and high schools.

The ending does not really wrap up anything, but is consistent with Wolfe's recent endings. Wolfe leaves to us to supply the ending and meaning of it all. And when you finish reading this book, you may well break out in a sweat when you realize your children have sent their SAT's to all 10 of the top party schools.

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful.
Wolfe examines the underbelly of higher education
By Thomas Stamper
To paraphrase Michael Barone, our society creates the most inept 18 year-olds and the most super competent 30 year-olds in the world. Tom Wolfe shows us in I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS how incompetent the 18 year olds of today are, in the setting of a prestigious University full of the best and brightest. His third novel should worry parents and enlighten the rest of us.

Those familiar with Wolfe's style of new journalism will appreciate how he uses a combination of subtlety and action to reveal character traits and feelings. Wolfe's characters are funny because they are mostly charlatans, egomaniacs or self-righteous bores. This novel and his last both introduce sympathetic characters and he puts them into a society that doesn't understand their inherent goodness. Wolfe makes his heroes re-think their own values in a world that would just as soon stomp on them.

Charlotte has been given the immense gift of fleeing her poor rural life and living amongst contemporary geniuses. What she assumes will be discussion groups on philosophy and science is, in fact, a campus of frat parties and hooking up. She's isolated and clings to her own small town values, but as her loneliness grows deeper, she compromises little things and later bigger things to better fit in. Wolfe gives us 700 pages to watch Charlotte's strength get sapped by the unforgiving realities of contemporary life.

Along the way we meet jocks, geeks, frat boys, sorority girls, genius professors and radical hippy ones. We meet college coaches and rich parents and famous politicians and very few of them come off looking noble. Wolfe can be salacious when he describes the goings on and it's a big plus for the book, because we can enjoy the description and later feel morally superior to the acts themselves. It's not too unlike how Cecil B. DeMille created biblical epics to get away with all kinds of lasciviousness.

This is an unforgiving look at how modern colleges have adopted ancient Greek Bacchus like behavior, while ignoring the virtuous Socratic philosophy. Some writers may have used this material to endlessly moralize, but Wolfe seems more like one of those ancient Greek Gods laughing from Mount Olympus.

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> Download Ebook Where Have You Been?: Selected Essays, by Michael Hofmann

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An adventure with a roving genius of literary criticism

Michael Hofmann―poet, translator, and intellectual vagabond―has established himself as one of the keenest critics of contemporary literature. Safely nestled between the covers of Where Have You Been?, he offers a hand to guide us and an encouraging whisper in our ear, leading us on a trip through what to read, how to think, and why to like. And while these essays bear sharp insights that will help us revisit writers with a fresh eye, they are also a story of love between a reader and his treasured books.
In the thirty essays collected here, Hofmann brings his signature wit and sustained critical mastery to a poetic, penetrating, and candid discussion of the writers and artists of the last hundred years. Here are the indispensable poets without which contemporary poetry would be unimaginable―Elizabeth Bishop, "the poets' poets' poet," the "ghostly skill" of Robert Lowell, and the man he calls the greatest English poet since Shakespeare, Ted Hughes. But he also illumines the despair of John Berryman and the antics of poetry's bogeyman, Frederick Seidel.
In essays on art that are themselves works of art, Hofmann's agile and brilliant mind explores a panoply of subjects from the mastery of translation to the best day job for a poet. What these diverse gems share are the critic's insatiable curiosity and great charm. Where Have You Been? is an unmissable journey with literature's most irresistible flaneur.

• Sales Rank: #998741 in Books
• Brand: Hofman, Michael
• Published on: 2014-12-02
• Released on: 2014-12-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.13" w x 6.22" l, 1.00 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Review

“A good critic, like a good editor, is rarer on these shores than an osprey. That's why the uplifting sight of Michael Hofmann gliding across our horizon - magesterial, languid (pre-swoop), unpredictable - is so welcome. Where Have You Been?, comprising his latest essays, is a bracingly intelligent book.” ―Nicholas Shakespeare, The Telegraph

"Admirers of Michael Hofmann’s ironic and astute sensibility can renew their enjoyment with his collection of essays, Where Have You Been?" ―Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian

"My reading has been various, but some fine books stick out at different angles. The most angular has been Michael Hofmann's Where Have You Been: Selected Essays, with its sharp take on prominent modern writers of verse and prose." ―Chris Wallace-Crabbe, The Sydney Morning Herald

“An underused binary when it comes to taxonomizing literary critics is to distinguish between those who write best in hatred and those who write best in love. The translator, poet, and essayist Michael Hofmann belongs resolutely to the second category, and his latest collection shows that there is something noble about a critic who is most brilliant when being laudatory . . . his aim was 'to write with an homage (for the most part) to literature in something that itself approached the condition of literature.' And the 30 essays collected here . . . are a testament to that intention.” ―Alice Gregory, The New York Times Book Review

"The poets Hofmann admires spring to life on the page. The writing is high-spirited and exhilirating and generous . . . In this book, in which there seem to be all the different ways of being a poet, I see all the different ways of being a person, all the ways of living." ―Susie Boyt, Financial Times

"The poet and translator Michael Hofmann is one of the most charismatic figures on the contemporary literary scene . . . Where Have You Been? is a stunning, endlessly surprising book of criticism." ―Terry Kelly, The London Magazine

“*Starred Review* "Based on this collection, Hofmann deserves to be considered one of today's premier critics. ” ―Publishers Weekly

“In this vibrant collection of previously published essays, poet, critic and translator Hofmann elevates criticism to an art. He amply fulfills his aim to ‘investigate and animate' his subjects, ‘make them resonate, play with and in and over them' . . . As these passionate essays attest, Hofmann cares deeply: about writing, art and the creative possibilities of criticism. ” ―Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Michael Hofmann is an acclaimed poet, translator, and critic. He has published six books of poetry and has translated more than sixty books from the German, including Gottfried Benn's Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose, as well as works by Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Roth. His criticism appears regularly in the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and Poetry. He currently teaches poetry and translation at the University of Florida.

Most helpful customer reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Exhausting but essential
By Roger Downey
This is less criticism than alchemy: an author's work goes into Hofmann's hopper, there's a rasp of gears engaging, and a fountain of confetti shoots up to form a polychrome pointillist auto portrait of a sensibility.

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