Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is classic Tom Wolfe, a funny, irreverent, and "delicious" (The Wall Street Journal) dissection of class and status by the master of New Journalism.

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

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

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