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Back to Blood: A Novel [Hardcover]

Back to Blood: A Novel [Hardcover] Reviews

When my mother died twenty one years ago, a Herald reporter, assigned to write her obituary, asked me if she resented all the changes that had come to Miami during the forty plus years she had lived in South Florida. My mother, having once quit the Junior League when asked to make a speech about "holding the color line", might have cancelled her subscription to the paper on the spot. She loved Miami and everything it had become. She watched in wonderment as the nouveau riche socialites invaded the emerging art community, of which as a member of the Art In Public Places Trust, she was a key player. Their never-ending social climbing and self-promoting "philanthropy" was the subject of many cocktail hour stories in my house. So this is a very personal book for me. It is about the community Miami in which I grew up, and the cultural and economic forces which make the former sleepy Southern outpost, full of Georgians like my parents into a world-class city. Money and culture define the town-the old guard WASPs (like me), the first, second and third waves of Cuban migration, the Haitians, and now the Russians some of whom are more brutal than the Columbian cowboys of thirty years ago who once staged a gun battle on the Palmetto Expressway. But it is money that truly defines this place as Tom Wolfe so aptly describes. Social climbing has never gone away, and if you want to be a crook around here, the surest way to succeed and escape the interest of law enforcement and the press is to spread cash around and get your name on every cultural institution in sight. Wolfe may be the best chronicler of urban life in the modern era. Bonfire of the Vanities nails New York. A Man in Full skewers Atlanta. And now Back to Blood reveals Miami. Not that many years ago, the Miami tourism bureau offered a poster of the back of a model, clad only with mask, snorkel and the skimpy bottom half of a bikini with the tag line "Miami. See It Like a Native." The model, who had been a secretary in a law firm where I was practicing, was not quite as exciting in real life as she was plastered in airports around the world. This book, however, is. Even if you are not from here, it will amaze you.. this is my Back to Blood: A Novel [Hardcover] reviews

Back to Blood: A Novel [Hardcover] Specs

• Amazon.com Review
• A writer like Tom Wolfe probably shouldn't have to stage a comeback, but there will doubtless be reviewers of his new novel, Back to Blood, who describe it that way. In Wolfe's career of great books, his last novel, published in 2004, was considered by many to be a stumble--but Back to Blood is a return to form, a work that solidifies Wolfe's stature as one of the best. Using his incisive journalistic skills, his flair for the cinematic moment, and his laugh-out-loud sense of humor, Wolfe takes the disparate types in and around Miami to create a tapestry of memorable scenes and characters. The result is entertaining, revealing, and perhaps even bigger than the sum of its parts. This is a book that will do for Miami what Wolfe's mega-hit The Bonfire of the Vanities did for New York. --Chris Schluep
• From Booklist
• *Starred Review* After skewering academia in I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), Wolfe, the impish, white-suited satirist, eviscerates a city-in-flux as he did with New York in The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Atlanta in A Man in Full (1998). This time he takes on Miami, which, as one character declares, is not America. Wolfe's pizzazz and obsessions are on peacock display, from slapstick action to ironic stereotypes to photorealist settings, including smugly trendy restaurants, a gated island, the bawdy Biscayne Bay regatta, and the prestigious annual exhibition, Art Basel Miami. The king and queen in his chess-set cast of characters are two young Cuban Americans determined to ascend above the modest homes and rigid mindsets of their "Little Havana" neighborhood. Freakishly muscular Nestor is a sweet-natured cop who earns combustible notoriety when he daringly rescues an illegal Cuban immigrant from atop a ship's mast. Beautiful Magdalena is a nurse working for an Anglo psychiatrist who treats wealthy patients addicted to pornography. Also on the board are a sly, Waspy reporter; a suspect Russian art collector; and a lovely Haitian college student. Within a masterfully strategized plot, Wolfe works his sardonic mojo to mock both prejudice and decadence and demolish the art world, reality TV, tawdry fame, and journalism in the digital age. Though plagued with belabored sex scenes, this is a shrewd, riling, and exciting tale of a volatile, divisive, sun-seared city where "everybody hates everybody." HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Anticipation has been high for several years now, so the publisher will crank up the publicity for what can legitimately be dubbed a cultural event. --Donna Seaman
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