Tom Wolfe Books

I'd like to read it with agrand pleasure

This tape is an interview with Tom Wolfe that was recorded at the Smithsonian. The interview lasts about an hour and Wolfe talks about his life, how he became a journalist, how he became a novelist and his philosopy of the novel.

The interview is much too short. Wolfe could probably talk on any one of those four things for an hour at a time. Many times on this tape the interviewer is getting to the "meat" of the issue - and then he changes the subject!

The best part of the tape is Wolfe's ideas on the state of writing. Too many novelists' today belong to what Wolfe calls the "Thumbsucking" school of writing - only concerned with what is immediately surrounding them and unwilling to go out and engage the world. Wolfe sums it up nicely as thus: "Emerson said that 'every person has a great autobiography to write'. The problem is he didn't say 'every person has TWO great autobiographies' to write"!

The box says this is "Volume Two" of some kind of some kind of lecture series. Somewhat odd as Volume One and Volume Three don't seem to exist!

This is one of the earlier books in the Jack Ryan enterprise. It starts off pretty slow and does not really take off like many of the others. Jack and Cathy Ryan have just moved to London with Sally and Jack Jr. The Foleys, Ed, Pat and Little Ed, have just started in Moscow. The Russians are crazy as ever and want to kill the Pope. A Russian communications expert gets a case of morals and wants to try and save the Pope. I should not say much more, or I will ruin the best part. I have read many Clancy's and this would not be in my top 5 but it does put a few things together so I am glad that I read it. I guess I would give it a C+.

It is a shame no stars is not an option for rating. It would appear Clancy was attempting to write the screenplay of another Jack Ryan movie with this work.

With the high tension that was rampant between NATO and the Warsaw Pact during this time period, there was plenty of background to place many of the characters from his other books. And I had to laugh at Clancy's buildup of Ed Foley and the New York Times reporter, yet there was no further mention of this later in Foley's career. The NYT would have never lived down a sleeper CIA agent on their reporter staff.

Instead, we get a plodding story that is lacking virtually everything Clancy had become well known for.

...and it only gets worse with the TEETH OF THE TIGER.

The Ryan saga goes back in time. Clancy as usual gets long winded and seems to gt tired of the story by delivering a sub par ending. Overall a bit disappointing.

Jack Ryan's evolution has followed that of the author. In the earlier books Jack Ryan was a well intentioned, if reluctant, hero who had a simple rubric for determining right from wrong. As Tom Clancy has "evolved" from a fiction writer to a "personality" we have seen Jack Ryan go from a simple CIA analyst to President of the free world. Along the way he became a foul mouthed, boorish individual who bases his decisions on Catholic doctrine and conservative dogma. I guess this is what happens when the author thinks people actually care what he thinks. This reader doesn't.

The saddest thing about this book is the depiction of Cathy Ryan. She once was depicted as a classy lady. Now she is a nasty individual who would easy (and fairly) characterized by the use of the "b" or "c" word. The only good thing about the book is her character disappeared half way through. It was one half too many.

My days of feeding Clancy's ego are over. He can get rich off other people who think what he says is important. He should take some lessons from John Grisham and build baseball fields in needy communities. And most importantly, keep his opinions to himself.

This has to be the most turgid, dull, repetitive pile of absolute tosh I have read in years. Nothing more than a 600 page propaganda leaflet for the Republican Party, the US military industrial complex, privatised medicine, the Catholic church and whatever else Tom Clancy supports, it's a painful read that seems to never end.

Your mind will bend as you read Clancy's utterly lame attempts at mundane and repetitive dialog between people eating breakfast, drinking coffee and riding on trains and in taxis.

Your eyes will roll at each stab at the British healthcare system, which is "socialized medicine" for those of you reading in the United States. You might think Clancy hates the concept as much as he clearly hates Communists.

Everything else about Britain and the "Brits", meanwhile, he seems to love in an offensively patronising and condescending manner that will make you gag. Those "Brits" seem all to be ripped from central casting in their accents, actions, and universal love of liquid lunches. All appear to be ex-British military and most have one syllable names, in a reassuringly working class, honest guvna' fashion.

You will also squirm every time you read the word "pshrink", or "cutter", or "driver". You will wonder why you never hear people in real life with such limited vocabularies as the characters in his books. How bored you will be as you read again and again about those "eye cutters" from "Hopkins" who worked on Suslov's eyes under the direction of token Jewish man, Bernie Katz.

You will also shudder each time you are clumsily reminded that the Soviets have unwittingly given the code "666" to a plot to kill the Pope.

You will want to be sick every time Jack Ryan's tastes in coffee are mentioned, and when you are reminded how unbelievably smart he is to recognize that an up and coming company called Starbucks will be a huge success. You will also wonder where Ryan's Starbucks obsession was when he was chasing the Red October around the Atlantic and doing battle with drug cartels in Central America.

You will also find yourself wishing Jack Ryan hadn't survived that damn helicopter crash because you are so fed up of reading about it and how much he hates flying, a characteristic he apparently shares with B.A. Baracus. You almost start to hope someone would feed Ryan a hamburger in a brown paper bag and a carton of milk before he gets on a plane so he's not conscious to whine about it.

In using the fear-of-flying device, Clancy clearly wants us to believe that Ryan, a multi-millionaire who has killed IRA terrorists, invested in Starbucks in the early 80s, arrested a Bulgarian assasin, helped capture a Soviet ballistic missile submarine, and become President of the United States has at least one weakness that makes him at least somewhat the everyman among us.

Apart from the atrocious errors in history already mentioned (Clancy must have thought himself oh-so-clever to keep mentioning that young short stop Cal Ripken and hoped we would think him clever for it), you will wonder how an assasination attempt in 1981 happened after the 1982 Falklands War.

Finally, you will wonder what the heck ever happened to Tom Clancy, when exactly the point in time was that his ego overtook his limited writing skills and why exactly he thinks smart people will part with good money to read bad books with his name on them.

It's strictly about carving two patterns on handles of canes or walking sticks. I'm a beginer, so I need a more complete book. The step-by-step color pictures are great-- in fine detail, but they need to be numbered in order, to avoid confusion.
The book is poorly bound; I had to glue the back cover, but it just came loose again.

this artical is pointless and thats all it is, an artical nothing more I would have done better to have bought a magazine. Thanks for tricking me out of two dollars.

Well, it's 2 pages long. That is, if you count that it has extra large type in the title, large graphics, and a paragraph hawking his website as part of the "book". Overall it's really just a few vague paragraphs. Stupid me, I read a whole lot of the titles of these e-books and chose them based on the titles instead of trying one out first. I bought a bunch of them and there really are no new ideas in them. Each is 2 pages (or 3) long, with big type, graphics, large heading, and a paragraph at the end suggesting you subscribe to his website. I guess I forgot to wash the "gullible" off my forehead. Enjoy the $20 you made from me Dr. Nelson ... everyone else, save your money and buy a REAL book on management instead for $20. Amazon has a lot better ones to choose from.

I loved Bonfire Of The Vanities, it's one of the best books
of the 20th Century. A Man Full was good but not great. This
book of dog carvings was awful. I don't get it... was Tom
Wolfe trying to be ironic?

While the drawings in this book are well done and, many times, amusing, they by no means constitute patterns for the wood carver. The are nothing more than line drawings and as such, could be found in any coloring book of dogs.

True patterns should consist of front side and back, or top views of the subject and Mr. Wolfe doesn't provide this for any of his drawings. What he offers is one view, mainly side view, of the subject, not true patterns at all.

Mr Wolfe does state in his introduction that he shows only one view and that's because he prefers to work from one view, however Mr Wolfe is writing this book for the general public and most of us aren't quite as artistically inclined as Mr. Wolfe, something he should keep in mind. Also, I didn't know that the book contained drawings in the singular view until I'd order it, paid for it, received it, and read Mr. Wolfe's intro. By then it was too late.

I would definitely not recomend this book to anyone who isn't an experienced carver.

Here again, Tom Wolfe has put out a book of patterns that should be regarded more as a collection of sketches. The drawings in his book are single-side views only and in no way represent true patterns for a wood carver.

Again, Mr. Wolfe states in his introduction that he prefers to work from the single view, as if that's the way the rest of the world should operate simply because he does. Mr Wolfe should realize that the people who buy these books are usually beginners in the field and many of us don't have the artistic ability to draw the other needed views ourselves. To anyone other than an experienced artist, woodcarver, this book is pretty worthless.

I wouldn't recommend it at all and it makes me angry that someone with Mr. Wolfe's talent and reputation would publish something like this and call it a book of patterns.

The only instructions are for the gargoyle and the "templates are not for all the canes shown on the cover. Definately not for beginners and/or intermediate carvers.

Lovely cover photo. But the piece that is carved step-by-step inside the book looks nothing like that. It's an ugly, gap-toothed face that I sure wound't want leering down at me from the wall. Tom Wolfe knows how to carve, it's true - I just wish he had illustrated inside the book the nice carvings that were on the cover.