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 The phrase 'radical chic' was coined by Tom Wolfe in 1970 when Leonard Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers at his duplex apartment on Park Avenue. That incongruous scene is re-created here in high fidelity as is another meeting ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment . Radical Chic provocatively explores the relationship between Black rage and White guilt. Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, set in San Francisco at the Office of Economic Opportunity, details the corruption and dysfunction of the anti-poverty programs run at that time. Wolfe uncovers how much of the program's money failed to reach its intended recipients. Instead, hustlers gamed the system, causing the OEO efforts to fail the impoverished communities. “What Tom Wolfe has done is create an appallingly funny, cool, small, deflative two-scene social drama about America's biggest, hottest, and most perplexing problem--the confrontation between Black Rage and White Guilt.” ― Time magazine “Wolfe's genius is that he is fair; he puts the Bernstein part in perspective against the background of New York social history. Read it and weep with laughter.” ― Houston Post “A sociological classic . . . At Wolfe's hands the socialites get a roasting they will long remember.” ― Saturday Review “Tom Wolfe understands the human animal like no sociologist around. He tweaks his reader's every buried though and prejudice. He sees through everything. He is as original and outrageous as ever.” ― The New York Times “Uproariously funny and socially perceptive . . . a penetrating dissection of the confusion among the classes and the search for status.” ― Women's Wear Daily “Tom Wolfe at his most clever, amusing, and irreverent.” ― San Franciscio Chronicle “Absolutely brilliant. One of the finest examples of reporting and social commentary I have read anywhere.” ― Gay Talese Tom Wolfe (1930–2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of contemporary classics like The Right Stuff and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers , as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities , A Man in Full , and I Am Charlotte Simmons . As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post , the New York Herald Tribune , Esquire , and New York Magazine , and is credited with coining the term, “The Me Decade.” Among his many honors, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City. Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers By Tom Wolfe Picador Copyright © 2009 Tom Wolfe All right reserved. ISBN: 9780312429133 Radical Chic AT 2 OR 3 OR 4 A.M., SOMEWHERE ALONG IN THERE, ON August 25, 1966, his forty-eighth birthday, in fact, Leonard Bernstein woke up in the dark in a state of wild alarm. That had happened before. It was one of the forms his insomnia took. So he did the usual. He got up and walked around a bit. He felt groggy. Suddenly he had a vision, an inspiration. He could see himself, Leonard Bernstein, the egregio maestro, walking out on stage in white tie and tails in front of a full orchestra. On one side of the conductor’s podium is a piano. On the other is a chair with a guitar leaning against it. He sits in the chair and picks up the guitar. A guitar! One of those half-witted instruments, like the accordion, that are made for the Learn-to-Play-in-Eight-Days E-Z-Diagram 110-IQ fourteen-year-olds of Levittown! But there’s a reason. He has an anti-war message to deliver to this great starched white-throated audience in the symphony hall. He announces to them: “I love.” Just that. The effect is mortifying. All at once a Negro rises up from out of the curve of the grand piano and starts saying things like, “The audience is curiously embarrassed.” Lenny tries to start again, plays some quick numbers on the piano, says, “I love. Amo ergo sum.” The Negro rises again and says, “The audience thinks he ought to get up and walk out. The audience thinks, ‘I am ashamed even to nudge my neighbor.’ ” Finally, Lenny gets off a heartfelt anti-war speech and exits. For a moment, sitting there alone in his home in the small hours of the morning, Lenny thought it might just work and he jotted the idea down. Think of the headlines: BERNSTEIN ELECTRIFIES CONCERT AUDIENCE WITH ANTI-WAR APPEAL. But then his enthusiasm collapsed. He lost heart. Who the hell was this Negro rising up from the piano and informing the world what an ass Leonard Bernstein was making of himself? It didn’t make sense, this superego Negro by the concert grand. MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. THESE ARE NICE. LITTLE