menu
{ "item_title" : "Hooking Up", "item_author" : [" Tom Wolfe "], "item_description" : "America'smaestro reporter/novelist gives America an MRI at the dawn of a new age.Only yesterday boys and girls spoke ofembracing and kissing (necking) as getting to first base. Second base was deepkissing, plus groping and fondling this and that. Third base was oral sex. Homeplate was going all the way. That was yesterday. Here in the year 2000 we canforget about necking. Today's girls and boys have never heard of anything thatdainty. Today's first base is deep kissing, now known as tonsil hockey, plusgroping and fondling this and that. Second base is oral sex. Third base is goingall the way. Home plate is learning each other's names.And how rarely our hooked-up boys and girlslearn each other's names! -- as Tom Wolfe has discovered from a survey of girls'Filofax diaries, to cite but one of Hooking Up's displays of his famedreporting prowess. Wolfe ranges from coast to coast, chronicling everything fromthe sexual manners and mores of teenagers ... to fundamental changes in the wayhuman beings now regard themselves, thanks to the hot new fields ofgenetics and neuroscience ... to the reasons why, at the dawn of a newmillennium, no one is celebrating the second American Century.Printed here in its entirety is Ambushat Fort Bragg, a novella about sting TV which has prefigured with eerieaccuracy three cases of scandal and betrayal that have lately exploded in thepress, as well as Wolfe's forecasts (My Three Stooges,The Invisible Artist) of radical changes about to sweep the arts.Hooking Up is a chronicle of thehere and now, but for dessert it closes with the legendary,never-before-reprinted pieces about The New Yorker and its famouslyreclusive editor, William Shawn, which early on helped win Wolfe his matchlessreputation for reportorial bravura, dead-on insight, and stylistic legerdemain-- qualities everywhere evident in this gloriously no-holds-barred, un-put-downablenew book.AuthorTom Wolfe is the author of more than a dozen books, among them suchcontemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The RightStuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and A Man in Full. Anative of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and LeeUniversity and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He lives in New York City.ExcerptThe following is an excerpt from the book Hooking Upby Tom WolfePublished by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; October 2000;$25.00US/$39.95CAN; 0-374-10382-8Copyright © 2000 Tom WolfeHooking Up:What Life Was Like at the Turnof the Second Millennium:An American's WorldBythe year 2000, the term working class had fallen into disuse in theUnited States, and proletariat was so obsolete it was known only toa few bitter old Marxist academics with wire hair sprouting out of theirears. The average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic, or burglar-alarmrepairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King blink. He spent hisvacations in Puerto Vallarta, Barbados, or St. Kitts. Before dinner he would beout on the terrace of some resort hotel with his third wife, wearing his RickyMartin cane-cutter shirt open down to the sternum, the better to allow his goldchains to twinkle in his chest hairs. The two of them would have just ordered around of Quibel sparkling water, from the state of West Virginia, because by2000 the once-favored European sparkling waters Perrier and San Pellegrinoseemed so tacky.European labels no longer held even the slightest snob appeal except amongpeople known as intellectuals, whom we will visit in a moment. Ourtypical mechanic or tradesman took it for granted that things European weresecond-rate. Aside from three German luxury automobiles -- the Mercedes-Benz,the BMW, and the Audi -- he regarded European-manufactured goods as mediocre toshoddy. On his trips abroad, our electrician, like any American businessman,would go to superhuman lengths to avoid being treated in European hospitals,which struck him as little better than those in the Third World. He consideredEuropean hygiene so primitive that to receive an injection in a European clinicvoluntarily was sheer madness.Indirectly, subconsciously, his viewsperhaps had to do with the fact that his own country, the United States, was nowthe mightiest power on earth, as omnipotent as Macedon under Alexander theGreat, Rome under Julius Caesar, Mongolia under Genghis Khan, Turkey underMohammed II, or Britain under Queen Victoria. His country was so powerful, ithad begun to invade or rain missiles upon small nations in Europe, Africa, Asia,and the Caribbean for no other reason than that their leaders were lording itover their subjects at home.Our air-conditioning mechanic hadprobably never heard of Saint-Simon's, but he was fulfilling Saint-Simon's andthe other nineteenth-century utopian socialists' dreams of a day when theordinary workingman would have the political and personal freedom, the free timeand the wherewithal to express himself in any way he saw fit and to unleash hisfull potential. Not only that, any ethnic or racial group -- any, evenrecent refugees from a Latin country -- could take over the government of anyAmerican city, if they had the votes and a modicum of organization. Americanscould boast of a freedom as well as a power unparalleled in the history of theworld.Our typical burglar-alarm repairmandidn't display one erg of chauvinistic swagger, however. He had been numbed bythe aforementioned intellectuals, who had spent the preceding eightyyears being indignant over what a puritanical,repressive, bigoted, capitalistic, andfascist nation America was beneath its democratic façades. It madehis head hurt. Besides, he was too busy coping with what was known as thesexual revolution. If anything, sexual revolution wasrather a prim term for the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiestcountry on earth in the year 2000. Every magazine stand was a riot of bareflesh, rouged areolae, moistened crevices, and stiffened giblets: boys withgirls, girls with girls, boys with boys, bare-breasted female bodybuilders,so-called boys with breasts, riding backseat behind steroid-gorged bodybuildingbikers, naked except for cache-sexes and Panzer helmets, on huge chromedHonda or Harley-Davidson motorcycles.But the magazines were nothing comparedwith what was offered on an invention of the 1990s, the Internet. By 2000, anestimated 50 percent of all hits, or log-ons, were at Web sitespurveying what was known as adult material. The wordpornography had disappeared down the memory hole along withproletariat. Instances of marriages breaking up because of Web-sexaddiction were rising in number. The husband, some fifty-two-year-old MRItechnician or systems analyst, would sit in front of the computer fortwenty-four or more hours at a stretch. Nothing that the wife could offer him inthe way of sexual delights or food could compare with the one-handing he wasdoing day and night as he sat before the PC and logged on to such images as agirl with bare breasts and a black leather corset standing with one foot on thesmall of a naked boy's back, brandishing a whip.In 1999, the year before, thisparticular sexual kink -- sadomasochism -- had achieved not merelyrespectability but high chic, and the word perversion hadbecome as obsolete as pornography and proletariat.Fashion pages presented the black leather and rubber paraphernalia as style'scutting edge. An actress named Rene Russo blithely recounted in the Livingsection of one of America's biggest newspapers how she had consulted a formerdominatrix named Eva Norvind, who maintained a dungeon replete with whips andchains and assorted baffling leather masks, chokers, and cuffs, in order toprepare for a part as an aggressive, self-obsessed agent provocateur in TheThomas Crown Affair, Miss Russo's latest movie.Sexy was beginning toreplace chic as the adjective indicating what was smart andup-to-the-minute. In the year 2000, it was standard practice for the successfulchief executive officer of a corporation to shuck his wife of two to threedecades' standing for the simple reason that her subcutaneous packing wasdeteriorating, her shoulders and upper back were thickening like a shot-putter's-- in short, she was no longer sexy. Once he set up the old wife in aneedlepoint shop where she could sell yam to her friends, he was free totake on a new wife, a trophy wife, preferably a woman in hertwenties, and preferably blond, as in an expression from that time, alemon tart. What was the downside? Was the new couple consideredradioactive socially? Did people talk sotto voce, behind the hand, whenthe tainted pair came by? Not for a moment. All that happened was that everybodygot on the cell phone or the Internet and rang up or E-mailed one another tofind out the spelling of the new wife's first name, because it was always somename like Serena and nobody was sure how to spell it. Once that was written downin the little red Scully & Scully address book that was so popular amongpeople of means, the lemon tart and her big CEO catch were invited to all theparties, as though nothing had happened.Meanwhile, sexual stimuli bombarded theyoung so incessantly and intensely they were inflamed with a randy itch longbefore reaching puberty. At puberty the dams, if any were left, burst. In thenineteenth century, entire shelves used to be filled with novels whose storiesturned on the need for women, such as Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, to remainchaste or to maintain a façade of chastity. In the year 2000, a Tolstoy or aFlaubert wouldn't have stood a chance in the United States. From age thirteen,American girls were under pressure to maintain a façade of sexual experienceand sophistication. Among girls, virgin was a term of contempt. Theold term dating -- referring to a practice in which a boy asked agirl out for the evening and took her to the movies or dinner -- was now deaderthan proletariat or pornography orperversion. In junior high school, high school, and college, girlsheaded out in packs in the evening, and boys headed out in packs, hoping to meeteach other fortuitously. If they met and some girl liked the looks of someboy, she would give him the nod, or he would give her the nod, and the two ofthem would retire to a halfway-private room and hook up.*Endnotes have been omitted.Copyright © 2000 Tom Wolfe", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/37/410/382/0374103828_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "28.00", "online_price" : "28.00", "our_price" : "28.00", "club_price" : "28.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }
Hooking Up|Tom Wolfe
Hooking Up
local_shippingShip to Me
In Stock.
FREE Shipping for Club Members help

Overview

America's maestro reporter/novelist gives America an MRI at the dawn of a new age. 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! -- as Tom Wolfe has discovered from a survey of girls' Filofax diaries, to cite but one of Hooking Up's displays of his famed reporting prowess. 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. Printed here in its entirety is Ambush at Fort Bragg, a novella about sting TV which has prefigured with eerie accuracy three cases of scandal and betrayal that have lately exploded in the press, as well as Wolfe's forecasts ("My Three Stooges," "The Invisible Artist") of radical changes about to sweep the arts. Hooking Up is a chronicle of the here and now, but for dessert it closes with the legendary, never-before-reprinted pieces about The New Yorker and its famously reclusive editor, William Shawn, which early on helped win Wolfe his matchless reputation for reportorial bravura, dead-on insight, and stylistic legerdemain -- qualities everywhere evident in this gloriously no-holds-barred, un-put-downable new book. Author Tom Wolfe is the author of more than a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and A Man in Full. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He lives in New York City. Excerpt The following is an excerpt from the book Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; October 2000; $25.00US/$39.95CAN; 0-374-10382-8 Copyright © 2000 Tom Wolfe Hooking Up: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium: An American's World By the year 2000, the term "working class" had fallen into disuse in the United States, and "proletariat" was so obsolete it was known only to a few bitter old Marxist academics with wire hair sprouting out of their ears. The average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic, or burglar-alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King blink. He spent his vacations in Puerto Vallarta, Barbados, or St. Kitts. Before dinner he would be out on the terrace of some resort hotel with his third wife, wearing his Ricky Martin cane-cutter shirt open down to the sternum, the better to allow his gold chains to twinkle in his chest hairs. The two of them would have just ordered a round of Quibel sparkling water, from the state of West Virginia, because by 2000 the once-favored European sparkling waters Perrier and San Pellegrino seemed so tacky. European labels no longer held even the slightest snob appeal except among people known as "intellectuals," whom we will visit in a moment. Our typical mechanic or tradesman took it for granted that things European were second-rate. Aside from three German luxury automobiles -- the Mercedes-Benz, the BMW, and the Audi -- he regarded European-manufactured goods as mediocre to shoddy. On his trips abroad, our electrician, like any American businessman, would go to superhuman lengths to avoid being treated in European hospitals, which struck him as little better than those in the Third World. He considered European hygiene so primitive that to receive an injection in a European clinic voluntarily was sheer madness. Indirectly, subconsciously, his views perhaps had to do with the fact that his own country, the United States, was now the mightiest power on earth, as omnipotent as Macedon under Alexander the Great, Rome under Julius Caesar, Mongolia under Genghis Khan, Turkey under Mohammed II, or Britain under Queen Victoria. His country was so powerful, it had begun to invade or rain missiles upon small nations in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean for no other reason than that their leaders were lording it over their subjects at home. Our air-conditioning mechanic had probably never heard of Saint-Simon's, but he was fulfilling Saint-Simon's and the other nineteenth-century utopian socialists' dreams of a day when the ordinary workingman would have the political and personal freedom, the free time and the wherewithal to express himself in any way he saw fit and to unleash his full potential. Not only that, any ethnic or racial group -- any, even recent refugees from a Latin country -- could take over the government of any American city, if they had the votes and a modicum of organization. Americans could boast of a freedom as well as a power unparalleled in the history of the world. Our typical burglar-alarm repairman didn't display one erg of chauvinistic swagger, however. He had been numbed by the aforementioned "intellectuals," who had spent the preceding eighty years being indignant over what a "puritanical," "repressive," "bigoted," "capitalistic," and "fascist" nation America was beneath its democratic façades. It made his head hurt. Besides, he was too busy coping with what was known as the "sexual revolution." If anything, "sexual revolution" was rather a prim term for the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000. Every magazine stand was a riot of bare flesh, rouged areolae, moistened crevices, and stiffened giblets: boys with girls, girls with girls, boys with boys, bare-breasted female bodybuilders, so-called boys with breasts, riding backseat behind steroid-gorged bodybuilding bikers, naked except for cache-sexes and Panzer helmets, on huge chromed Honda or Harley-Davidson motorcycles. But the magazines were nothing compared with what was offered on an invention of the 1990s, the Internet. By 2000, an estimated 50 percent of all hits, or "log-ons," were at Web sites purveying what was known as "adult material." The word "pornography" had disappeared down the memory hole along with "proletariat." Instances of marriages breaking up because of Web-sex addiction were rising in number. The husband, some fifty-two-year-old MRI technician or systems analyst, would sit in front of the computer for twenty-four or more hours at a stretch. Nothing that the wife could offer him in the way of sexual delights or food could compare with the one-handing he was doing day and night as he sat before the PC and logged on to such images as a girl with bare breasts and a black leather corset standing with one foot on the small of a naked boy's back, brandishing a whip. In 1999, the year before, this particular sexual kink -- sadomasochism -- had achieved not merely respectability but high chic, and the word "perversion" had become as obsolete as "pornography" and "proletariat." Fashion pages presented the black leather and rubber paraphernalia as style's cutting edge. An actress named Rene Russo blithely recounted in the Living section of one of America's biggest newspapers how she had consulted a former dominatrix named Eva Norvind, who maintained a dungeon replete with whips and chains and assorted baffling leather masks, chokers, and cuffs, in order to prepare for a part as an aggressive, self-obsessed agent provocateur in The Thomas Crown Affair, Miss Russo's latest movie. "Sexy" was beginning to replace "chic" as the adjective indicating what was smart and up-to-the-minute. In the year 2000, it was standard practice for the successful chief executive officer of a corporation to shuck his wife of two to three decades' standing for the simple reason that her subcutaneous packing was deteriorating, her shoulders and upper back were thickening like a shot-putter's -- in short, she was no longer sexy. Once he set up the old wife in a needlepoint shop where she could sell yam to her friends, he was free to take on a new wife, a "trophy wife," preferably a woman in her twenties, and preferably blond, as in an expression from that time, a "lemon tart." What was the downside? Was the new couple considered radioactive socially? Did people talk sotto voce, behind the hand, when the tainted pair came by? Not for a moment. All that happened was that everybody got on the cell phone or the Internet and rang up or E-mailed one another to find out the spelling of the new wife's first name, because it was always some name like Serena and nobody was sure how to spell it. Once that was written down in the little red Scully & Scully address book that was so popular among people of means, the lemon tart and her big CEO catch were invited to all the parties, as though nothing had happened. Meanwhile, sexual stimuli bombarded the young so incessantly and intensely they were inflamed with a randy itch long before reaching puberty. At puberty the dams, if any were left, burst. In the nineteenth century, entire shelves used to be filled with novels whose stories turned on the need for women, such as Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, to remain chaste or to maintain a façade of chastity. In the year 2000, a Tolstoy or a Flaubert wouldn't have stood a chance in the United States. From age thirteen, American girls were under pressure to maintain a façade of sexual experience and sophistication. Among girls, "virgin" was a term of contempt. The old term "dating" -- referring to a practice in which a boy asked a girl out for the evening and took her to the movies or dinner -- was now deader than "proletariat" or "pornography" or "perversion." In junior high school, high school, and college, girls headed out in packs in the evening, and boys headed out in packs, hoping to meet each other fortuitously. If they met and some girl liked the looks of some boy, she would give him the nod, or he would give her the nod, and the two of them would retire to a halfway-private room and "hook up." *Endnotes have been omitted. Copyright © 2000 Tom Wolfe

Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780374103828
  • ISBN-10: 0374103828
  • Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
  • Publish Date: October 2000
  • Dimensions: 9.63 x 6.46 x 1.01 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.25 pounds
  • Page Count: 293

Related Categories

BAM Customer Reviews