The New York Times
What holds our attention in Back to Blood…are Mr. Wolfe's two main characters: Nestor Camacho…and his former girlfriend Magdalena…Although Mr. Wolfe can be patronizing toward this pair, mocking them for their ignorance and naïveté, he also portrays them with genuine sympathy, using their earnest idealism as a prism by which to view the pretensions, social climbing and Machiavellian manipulation that burbles all around them. Nestor and Magdalena show that…Mr. Wolfe has been able to build upon the advances he made in creating flesh-and-blood people in A Man in Full (1998)—people who are not defined simply by their clothes, cars and verbal idiosyncrasies, but who actually possess something resembling an inner life.
—Michiko Kakutani
From the Publisher
PRAISE FOR TOM WOLFE:
Bonfire of the Vanities (1987):
"A big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book that grabs you by the lapels and won't let go."—New York Times Book Review
"A superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right."—Washington Post Book World
A Man in Full (1998):
"The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written—not merely by contemporary American novelists but by any American novelist....The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting."—New York Times Book Review
I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004):
"Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era....A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel."—Lev Grossman, Time
"Wolfe's dialogue is some of the finest in literature, not just fast but deep. He hears the cacophony of our modern lives."—Los Angeles Times
"Brilliant...I couldn't stop reading it....Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post
New York Times
A soapy, gripping, and sometimes glib novel.”
Booklist (starred review)
A shrewd, riling, and exciting tale of a volatile, divisive, sun-seared city where ‘everybody hates everybody.’”
SoundCommentary.com
Actor Lou Diamond Phillips does full justice to Wolfe’s sprawling, multicharacter novel of present day Miami, with its amazing mixture of ethnicities and cultures. He can handle Cubans, African Americans, Russians, Haitians, and even elderly retired New Yorkers with ease and authority.”
editorial review Barnes & Noble
[Wolfe] has not lost his gift for panoramic presentation; Back to Blood surges with its large ensemble cast of Floridians and immigrants with mixed histories and conflicting agendas. This sun-bronzed band of sailors, crack dealers, art enthusiasts, porn addicts, insomniacs, and love-struck romantics keep the fiction bristling with meaning even as the action moves forward.”
AudioFile
Actor Lou Diamond Phillips portrays Nestor Comacho, a man with both pride in his heritage and a thirst to be fully assimilated into America’s ever-changing culture. Ultimately, he performs a death-defying act that is perceived as heroic in the white community and as a betrayal in the Latin community. Phillips relishes the dramatic pauses and changes pace to match Nestor’s inner struggle and frustrations.”
New York Times Book Review
Wolfe remains as skillful as ever in texturing the novel’s terrain, from the ‘prairie of concrete’ formed by Hialeah’s front yards to a tired retirement complex up in Broward County where ‘the little iron balconettes and the aluminum frames for the sliding doors looked as if they were about to fall off and die in a pile.”
Miami Herald
Wolfe, Master of the New Journalism Universe, has done his homework and done it well.”
Michael Dirda - Washington Post
"Brilliant...I couldn't stop reading it....Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure."
Los Angeles Times
"Wolfe's dialogue is some of the finest in literature, not just fast but deep. He hears the cacophony of our modern lives."
Lev Grossman - Time
I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004):
"Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era....A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel."
Washington Post Book World
"A superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right."
Adam Langer - San Francisco Chronicle
"Wolfe is writing with as much brio as he brought to his debut novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, 25 years ago. Back to Blood demonstrates the author's persistent vitality."
Kyle Smith - People
"The novel roars and zips along like a cigarette boat, and even at 81 the Man in White proves to be a marvelous reporter. Call this bawdy humdinger the Bonfire of the Miamians."
Sarah Fenske - LA Weekly
"A breezy, funny read...and an examination of just what it means to be a man."
Bob Hoover - Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Another big, sprawling, engrossing, hilarious, character-packed and action-driven novel by the master chronicler of modern America."
Michael Moynihan - The Daily Beast
"Back to Blood is a bracing vision of America's shifting demography and the immutability of ethnic conflict and class aspirations....Wolfe demonstrates that his skills as a novelist and a chronicler of America's class anxieties are undiminished."
Dale Singer - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"A typically overstuffed, overstated, delectably over-the-top portrait of modern Miami."
Ken Armstrong - Seattle Times
"A rollicking good story. Akin to The Bonfire of the Vanities, the book has memorable characters and big themes."
John Timpane - Philadelphia Enquirer
"With the sweep, particularity, and deliciously flamboyant language that have become Wolfe trademarks, Back to Blood tackles Miami and environs. Wolfeian description is seldom just pretty writing--almost always, the physical environment tells the person, tells the society."
Husna Huq - Christian Science Monitor
"Preposterous, overwrought, contrived, wildly ambitious, and outrageously entertaining. It is, in other words, classic Wolfian fare."
James Wolcott - Vanity Fair
"The premier 19th-century novelist of the 21st century, the thin white duke of American neon prose, Tom Wolfe may be the last of the literary showmen in the era of mopers and trauma specialists. Wolfe shows no signs of slackening energy or ambition in his latest novel, Back to Blood."
William McKeen - Boston Sunday Globe
"Immensely entertaining and insightful. Nobody does hedonism and excess like Miami, and Wolfe has managed to wrangle all of his observations into an expansive book that despite its huge cast avoids becoming unruly."
Connie Ogle - Miami Herald
"The novel's pointed observations are dangerously close to reality: Wolfe, Master of the New Journalism Universe, has done his homework and done it well. There is nothing in the novel that couldn't happen tomorrow right outside your window."
Lev Grossman - Time Magazine
I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004):
"Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era....A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel.
Michael Dirda
Brilliant...I couldn't stop reading it....Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure.
— Washington Post
Lev Grossman
I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004):
"Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era....A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel.
— Time
Donna Seaman
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....This is a shrewd, riling, and exciting tale of a volatile, diverse, sun-seared city where 'everybody hates everybody.'
— Booklist (Starred Review)
