Hooking Up

Unabridged
Author: Tom Wolfe
Narrator: Ron Rifkin
Genres: Intimacy & Sex
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date: November 2009
Length: 6 hours
Ratings:
Formats:
  • CD
  • WMA

Overview

Only yesterday boys and girls spoke of embracing and kissing (necking) as getting to first base. Second base was deep kissing, plus groping and fondling this and that. Third base was oral sex. Home plate was going all the way. That was yesterday. Here in the year 2000 we can forget about necking. Today's girls and boys have never heard of anything that dainty. Today's first base is deep kissing, now known as tonsil hockey, plus groping and fondling this and that. Second base is oral sex. Third base is going all the way. Home plate is learning each other's names. And how rarely our hooked-up boys and girls learn each other's names!

Tom Wolfe ranges from coast to coast, chronicling everything from the sexual manners and mores of teenagers...to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves, thanks to the hot new fields of genetics and neuroscience...to the reasons why, at the dawn of a new millennium, no one is celebrating the second American Century.

Hooking Up is a chronicle of the here and now.

Reviews (4)

Wonderful Collection of Essays

Written by Anonymous on August 16th, 2006

  • Book Rating: 5/5

Tom Wolfe has written a truely wonderful and insightful collection of essays about the state of America in the year 2000. Although I don't always agree with everything he says, he has a sharp eye for the social customs and status-seeking ways of the human animal. Entertaining and informative. I'd recommend it to anyone with half a brain who is interested in our culture and our times.

HOOKING UP

Written by Tom W on November 21st, 2005

  • Book Rating: 1/5

Tom Wolfe is one of the best writers anywhere. However, this is a jumbled mis-match. A lot of odd ramblings.....some have a little interest but most of this 6 disc set is an exercise in droning boredom. If the Tom Wolfe name was not attached to this work, this mess would have never made it to print/disc. If you were expecting anything like "A Man in Full" you will have a terrible disappointment.

Off the hook boring

Written by Karen V on June 21st, 2005

  • Book Rating: 2/5

This might be a good book, it was hard to tell because the main reader was SO annoying with his sneering Jack Nicholson imitation. After a mean spirirted and irritating introduction read by Tom Wolfe, I grimly soldiered through 5 grindingly boring discs about the history of the semiconductor industry. Does anyone care about the minutia of Silicon Valley anymore? If you do, there are some asute observations buried in the writing. Disc 6 is actually quite good, but it is an appropriation of {theft of?} observations from many disciplines and is completely unrelated to the rest of the book.

Hooking Up

Written by Wes Fraser from Boynton Beach, FL on June 11th, 2005

  • Book Rating: 5/5

Only read this book if you can stand the truth. Wolfe looks at America at the turn of the millennium and sees it clearly. He then describes it as clearly. The culture nabobs will hate it because he skewers them with their own irrelevance. “Intellectuals,” “artists,” the universities and other Nuevo Marxists who pose above real people living real lives are nicely cut down to size. A must read if you believe in progress.

Author Details

Author Details

Wolfe, Tom

Tom Wolfe grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and graduated from Washington and Lee University. He received his doctorate in American Studies from Yale University. Mr. Wolfe worked as a reporter for the Springfield Union, The Washington Post, and the New York Herald Tribune. His writing has also appeared in New York magazine, Esquire, and Harper's.

In 1965 Farrar, Straus and Giroux published The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and in 1968 The Pump House Gang and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test were published simultaneously. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers was published in 1970.

In 1975, FSG published The Painted Word, an incandescent, hilarious look at the world of modern art; it caused as much controversy as anything Mr. Wolfe has written. Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine, a collection of essays, was published by FSG in 1976.

The Right Stuff, a national bestseller published by FSG in 1979, won the American Book Award for general nonfiction. The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters named Mr. Wolfe as recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for distinguished service in the field of journalism. From Bauhaus to Our House, his distinctive look at contemporary architecture, was published in the fall of 1981 and became another national bestseller; in 1982, FSG published The Purple Decades: A Reader. Mr. Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities was published by FSG in 1987, and went on to become one of the top ten bestselling books of the decade.

Tom Wolfe lives in New York City. On November 6,1998, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a new novel by Tom Wolfe entitled A Man in Full.