Rating: 
Summary: not bad, but a bit whiny
Review: Most of the essays here are entertaining and often thought provoking. Wolfe has a keen eye for many aspects of American life. I can not give it 5 stars, though. For someone who makes his living observing others Mr. Wolfe's skin is thin when he is put under the microscope himself. His disdain for Updike is ridiculous when one considers Updike's fiction is a graceful Michael Jordan flying dunk and Wolfe's is still based on descriptions of sounds and accents being spelled out in ALL CAP phonetics on every other page. This collection would have been better if he kept his own personal vendettas out, and stuck with what he does best.
Rating:
Summary: The American Century
Review: Mr. Wolfe's essays in "Hooking Up" address the astonishing, vibrant, and varied landscape of the richest, most powerful, and most energized nation in the world. His satire bombards many targets: wealth, sex, art, The New Yorker, and fashion. Spurred by his recent monetary success with a "Man in Full," he even takes revenge upon the hallowed trinity of Mailer, Updike, and Irving. Mr. Wolfe brilliantly targets (yet again) the total unimportance of academic criticism and modern art to the American century. Most interestingly, he delves into the ongoing quest to understand the human genetic code. As always, his satire and wit mask a respect for hard work, common people, and moral behavior. A very nice picture of the ongoing American saga.
Rating: 
Summary: I just don't think he's that original.
Review: Of Tom Wolfe, I've read thus far: Hooking Up, A Man in Full, and Bonfire of the Vanities -- but I think I'm done. His "observations" -- and his capacity for observation is the very quality for which so many reviewers are lamentably insistent upon praising him - evince, at best, a rudimentary understanding of modern culture, and most of his readers under 40 know it; or at least those who haven't been [swayed] by his reputation (though that, too, is waning). Bonfire was hardly of the earth-shattering importance with which so many ebullient reviewers infused it, and continue, in reviewing other novels, to offhandedly proliferate; A Man in Full was quite a lot worse, particularly the parts where Wolfe felt obliged to demonstrate his "keen ear" for the African American argot; and now he's gone and proven himself a pontificating windbag. One is actually embarrassed (the sort of vicarious embarrassment one feels violated for having been forced to experience) when he musters the effrontery to upbraid Updike, Irving and Mailer for their unanimous dislike of his meandering, clumsy novel with its contrived dialogue and characters and its idiosyncratic plotline, which ironically might not have been so utterly bereft of charm in Irving's hands.
Rating: 
Summary: An Uneven Collection
Review: OK, let me begin by saying that Tom Wolfe is one of my favorite authors. He does his homework, has an eye for detail and an exquisite (ooh...there's that word!) way of bending the English language to his purposes. So, I'm a fan. However, I found "Hooking Up" to be less than I expected or hoped for. Other reviewers have commented on the dubious relevance of some of the essays, and I agree. The piece on the NY Times was well-written, as usual, but I just didn't care about the topic. It seemed to be a little too shrill, a little too self-serving...but in the end I just didn't care. "Ambush At Fort Bragg" was deadly in its aim, but the sexual content bordered on pornographic (I say this even as I admit that it fit the context of the story) and, frankly, I'm just a tad weary of such things. Mr. Wolfe is at his best when he takes aim at current social, philosophic and scientific issues, and dissects them, layer by layer, exposing the good with the bad. He does this in a number of essays in this collection, and that is the saving grace for this book. If you're a Tom Wolfe fan, by all means - buy the book. If you're not familiar with his work but want to be, there are better choices.
Rating:
Summary: Tragically unhip
Review: One of the greatest tragedies of contemporary letters has been the way in which Tom Wolfe has lost his veneer of cool over the last thirty years, as he's become not only a member but a celebrant of the Establishment he once observed cynically from the sidelines. There's a glimpse of what made Wolfe the most important satirist of his generation in his splendidly funny profile of William Shawn, "Tiny Mummies!," but that was written over a generation ago. Most of his more recent pieces in this collection show instead how deeply out of it he remains today. "In the Land of Rococo Marxists" is almost an embarrassment: Wolfe here fulminates against academic faddishness, but the fads he singles out for scorn were relevant twenty years ago. He seems oblivious to the fact that Derrida has been largely passé for years--it's like complaining about contemporary music and heaping particular vitriol on the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. The response to his critics (John Irving, John Updike, and Norman Mailer) seems similarly out to lunch: he attacks them for qualities they don;t even possess, and seems to negelect how similar they are to him in their fictional styles. It's sad to see someone who once made such a name for himself as being positioned on the cutting edge still attempt to claim that position, but wind up instead seeming blithely unhip.
Rating:
Summary: Good
Review: The "Rococo Marxists" piece is wonderful (except for his cruel dismissiveness of kids suffering from ADD). So are a lot of other pieces here. The "My Three Stooges" piece is a bit much, though, where he knocks Mailer, Updike and Irving for criticizing A MAN IN FULL. For one thing, it WAS a very flawed novel. The other thing is he keeps getting in digs about how old the three men are, WHEN WOLFE IS IN THE SAME AGE RANGE AS MAILER AND UPDIKE. And Wolfe is a LOT older than John Irving! Irving is in his 50's, whereas Wolfe is in his 70's. So who is Wolfe to call John Irving old? I found that part of the essay, frankly, bizarre.
Rating:
Summary: some brilliant parts
Review: The essay "Two Young Men Who Went West" is worth the price of the book. This captures the essential spirit of Silicon Valley better than just about anything written about the subject.
Rating:
Summary: 3.5 stars, rounded up
Review: This book feels haphazard, because nothing unifies the selections. There are essays on the founder of Intel and on the New Yorker (among other subjects) mixed in with a novella and diatribe on three prominent authors. One senses the publisher's desire to get something, ANYTHING, by Wolfe into print before Christmas. The section of the book on the New Yorker is the most disappointing. The two pieces on the magazine are over thirty years old! The editor he mocks is long gone. Who cares anymore? This was disposable newspaper prose, not a work for the ages to be republished decades later. The New Yorker section also illustrates how little Wolfe has grown in the intervening years. He keeps his choice of topics fresh, and he still has an acute eye for detail, but the writing style! All those exclamation marks! The old man in white still writes like the Young Turk he once was! Amazing! And that sneering prose! Still there! But shouldn't we expect some changes in his knockabout prose in the past decades? Furthermore, Wolfe is recycling ideas. In how many books has he compared the dress of doormen to 19th century Austrian colonels or Gilbert and Sullivan characters. It's funny the first couple of times but annoying afterwards. Even within this book he recycles many phrases, sometimes word-for-word. Is it deliberate or just sloppy editing? The novella "Ambush at Fort Bragg" on its own would be three-stars. Mostly it seems to be an excuse for Wolfe to write some porno scenes and to make fun of the people behind TV newsmagazines. But it also illustrates the limitations of his fiction. Unlike Dickens, who also was a reporter turned novelist with a great sense of humor, Wolfe has no affection for his characters. They all are just absurd spectacles for the man in white to mock. Yes, his mockery is funny, but it can wear thin. Where is the compassionate understanding of people that belongs to the greatest novelists? (Of course, Dickens can be mawkishly sentimental -- a sin Wolfe never shares.) Wolfe's characters are too thin to populate great literature. They are all absurd affect and pretension, no heart. Although Wolfe's attack upon Irving, Mailer, and Updike is in some respects petty, but it does allow him to make a case for his style of literature: engaged with its time and place. The usual suspects come in for a bashing (Marxists, the PC crowd, intellectuals, modern artists, etc.). Many of these people deserve to be bashed, but Wolfe has done so long before this book. In short: more recycling. For my money, the essays in the first section are the best. Wolfe shows his wonderful skills as an observer of the American scene. But he also displays his penchant for overstatement. For instance, to listen to Wolfe you'd think that American philosophy was a cesspool of deconstructionism. In fact, deconstructionism exists only at the fringes of philosophy in America. Most American philosophers come out of the tradition of Frege and Russell, not Heidegger and Derrida. Also, Wolfe oversimplifies the debate concerning sociobiology. Yes, many of E. O. Wilson's opponents have been uncivil and thuggish, but some have had legitimate concerns that his sociobiological program is an attempt to give social constructions the imprimatur of biological destiny. Wolfe gives Wilson's critics no credit at all. Wilson simply is portrayed as A Great Man having to do battle with the forces of ignorance and foolishness. My own opinion is that neither Wilson nor his opponents have proven their cases yet.
Rating: 
Summary: Thumbs Up
Review: This book has a lot of good stuff in it. My favorite observation of Wolfe's, though, is that for poetry to be acceptable in literary circles these days, it has to be obscure, oblique, and hard to understand. Poets are upset these days that they aren't famous like Robert Frost was. Well, that's why. Wolfe is refreshing, to say the least.
Rating:
Summary: Cooking Up, a Potboiler
Review: This book is seriously marred by Wolfe's complete lack of understanding of the Internet. He has no grasp of its cultural impact and substitutes sneers for his usual insight (Ok, it's usually snarky insight, but still...) The Fort Bragg piece is also weak. It reminds me of a Made for TV movie. Media opportunism isn't exactly a newsflash.
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