Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

In these two devastatingly funny essays, Tom Wolfe examines political stances, social styles, "black rage," and "white guilt" in our status-minded world.

In "These Radical Chic Evenings," Wolfe focuses primarily on one symbolic event: a gathering of the politically correct at Leonard Bernstein's duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Black Panther Party. He re-creates the incongruous scene and its astonishing repercussions with high fidelity.

And in "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers," Wolfe travels to  San Francisco to survey another meeting-ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment. This time the meeting deals with the newly emerging art of confrontation, as practiced by San Francisco's militant minorities in response to a highly bureaucratized poverty program.

With his fourth book, which brought the phrase "radical chic" into the cultural lexicon, Wolfe has never been more unflinching with his patented social criticism.