Back to Blood [NOOK Book]

( 46 )

Overview

A big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now.

As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay-with officer Nestor Camacho on board-Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, a wanna-go-muckraking young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse by ...
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Back to Blood

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More About This Book

Overview

A big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now.

As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay-with officer Nestor Camacho on board-Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, a wanna-go-muckraking young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse by day, loin lock by night-until lately, the love of Nestor's life; a refined, and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin' little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the 'hoods, "de-skilled" conceptual artists at the Miami Art Basel Fair, "spectators" at the annual Biscayne Bay regatta looking only for that night's orgy, yenta-heavy ex-New Yorkers at an "Active Adult" condo, and a nest of shady Russians. Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous bestselling novels, BACK TO BLOOD is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.
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Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

Tom Wolfe's first novel in eight years focuses on Miami's Biscayne Bay with its swirling stew of race, class, and sex. The author behind The Bonfire of the Vanities and I Am Charlotte Simmons had 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. Now in trade paperback and NOOK Book.

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
Publishers Weekly
Two hundred pages into Wolfe's frantic potboiler about Miami's melting pot, a description of City Hall reminds readers of the vivid detail that made Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities) a literary icon. Yet despite flashes of "the right stuff", his latest novel comprises not an exposé of popular culture so much as a lurid compendium of clichés. The prologue features a scandal-fearing newspaper editor fretting as his wife tries to park her mini-hybrid at a trendy restaurant, but the action begins with marine patrolman Nestor Camacho speeding across Biscayne Bay. Unfortunately, his moment of glory dissolves into humiliation when he is condemned for arresting, after saving, a Cuban refugee. Resolute in pressing on, a bewildered Nestor works with reporter John Smith to unravel fraud at the city's new art museum and uncover the truth behind an incident of school violence. In the process, he meets elegant Haitian beauty Ghislaine, whose professor father desperately hopes she'll "pass" for white. African Americans, Russian émigrés, and Jewish retirees also appear: ethnic groups separated by language, tribe, and class; linked together by sex, money, and real estate. Filling his prose with sound effects, foreign phrases, accented English, and slang, Wolfe creates his own Miami sound machine—noisy, chaotic, infused with tropical rhythms, and fueled by the American dream. The result is a book louder than it is deep; more sensational than it is thought provoking; less like Wolfe at his best, more like tabloid headlines recast as fiction. (Oct. 23)
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)
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

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 - 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.
New York Times Book Review
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.

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.
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.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780316214582
  • Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
  • Publication date: 10/23/2012
  • Sold by: Hachette Digital, Inc.
  • Format: eBook
  • Sales rank: 9,218
  • File size: 949 KB

Meet the Author

Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe is the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He lives in New York City.

Biography

Tom Wolfe was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He was educated at Washington and Lee (B.A., 1951) and Yale (Ph.D., American Studies, 1957) Universities. In December 1956, he took a job as a reporter on the Springfield (Massachusetts) Union. This was the beginning of a ten-year newspaper career, most of it as a general assignment reporter. For six months in 1960 he served as The Washington Post's Latin American correspondent and won the Washington Newspaper Guild's foreign news prize for his coverage of Cuba.

In 1962 he became a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and, in addition, one of the two staff writers (Jimmy Breslin was the other) of New York magazine, which began as the Herald Tribune's Sunday supplement. While still a daily reporter for the Herald Tribune, he completed his first book, a collection of articles about the flamboyant Sixties written for New York and Esquire and published in 1965 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux as The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The book became a bestseller and established Wolfe as a leading figure in the literary experiments in nonfiction that became known as the New Journalism.

In 1968 he published two bestsellers on the same day: The Pump House Gang, made up of more articles about life in the Sixties, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a nonfiction story of the hippie era. In 1970 he published Radical Chick & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, a highly controversial book about racial friction in the United States. The first section was a detailed account of a party Leonard Bernstein gave for the Black Panthers in his Park Avenue duplex, and the second portrayed the inner workings of the government's poverty program.

Even more controversial was Wolfe's 1975 book on the American art world, The Painted Word. The art world reacted furiously, partly because Wolfe kept referring to it as the "art village," depicting it as a network of no more than three thousand people, of whom about three hundred lived outside the New York metropolitan area. In 1976 he published another collection, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, which included his well-known essay "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening."

In 1979 Wolfe completed a book he had been at work on for more than six years, an account of the rocket airplane experiments of the post-World War II era and the early space program focusing upon the psychology of the rocket pilots and the astronauts and the competition between them. The Right Stuff became a bestseller and won the American Book Award for nonfiction, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Harold Vursell Award for prose style, and the Columbia Journalism Award.

"The right stuff," "radical chic," and "the Me Decade" (sometimes altered to "the Me Generation") all became popular phrases, but Wolfe seems proudest of "good ol' boy," which he had introduced to the written language in a 1964 article in Esquire about Junior Johnson, the North Carolina stock car-racing driver, which was called "The Last American Hero."

Wolfe had been illustrating his own work in newspapers and magazines since the 1950s, and in 1977 began doing a monthly illustrated feature for Harper's magazine called "In Our Time". The book, In Our Time, published in 1980, featured these drawings and many others. In 1981 he wrote a companion to The Painted Word entitled From Bauhaus to Our House, about the world of American architecture.

In 1984 and 1985 Wolfe wrote his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, in serial form against a deadline of every two weeks for Rolling Stone magazine. It came out in book form in 1987. A story of the money-feverish 1980s in New York, The Bonfire of the Vanities was number one of the New York Times bestseller list for two months and remained on the list for more than a year, selling over 800,000 copies in hardcover. It also became the number-one bestselling paperback, with sales above two million.

In 1989 Wolfe outraged the literacy community with an essay in Harper's magazine called "Stalking the Billion-footed Beast." In it he argued that the only hope for the future of the American novel was a Zola-esque naturalism in which the novelist becomes the reporter -- as he had done in writing The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was recognized as the essential novel of America in the 1980s.

In 1996, Wolfe wrote the novella Ambush at Fort Bragg as a two-part series for Rolling Stone. In 1997 it was published as a book in France and Spain and as an audiotape in the United States. An account of a network television magazine show's attempt to trap three soldiers at Fort Bragg into confessing to the murder of one of their comrades, it grew out of what had been intended as one theme in a novel Wolfe was working on at that time. The novel, A Man in Full, was published in November of 1998. The book's protagonists are a sixty-year old Atlanta real estate developer whose empire has begun a grim slide toward bankruptcy and a twenty-three-year-old manual laborer who works in the freezer unit of a wholesale food warehouse in Alameda County, California, owned by the developer. Before the story ends, both have had to face the question of what is it that makes a man "a man in full" now, at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium.

A Man in Full headed the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks and has sold nearly 1.4 million copies in hardcover. The book's tremendous commercial success, its enthusiastic welcome by reviewers, and Wolfe's appearance on the cover of Time magazine in his trademark white suit plus a white homburg and white kid gloves -- along with his claim that his sort of detailed realism was the future of the American novel, if it was going to have one -- provoked a furious reaction among other American novelists, notably John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving.

Wolfe's latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, explores the unique antics of college life. He lives in New York City with his wife, Sheila; his daughter, Alexandra; and his son, Tommy.

Author biography courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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    1. Also Known As:
      Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. (full name)
    2. Hometown:
      New York, New York
    1. Date of Birth:
      March 2, 1931
    2. Place of Birth:
      Richmond, Virginia
    1. Education:
      B.A. (cum laude), Washington and Lee University, 1951; Ph.D. in American Studies, Yale University, 1957
    2. Website:
      http://www.tomwolfe.com

Reading Group Guide

1. The title of Back to Blood's prologue, "We een Mee-AH-mee Now," is a Latina character's retort to a "gringa's" request that she speak English, because "YOU'RE IN AMERICA NOW!" How has your town or city changed due to its immigrant population? To what extent have the elements in its melting pot melted?
2. Tom Wolfe made a dozen extended trips to Miami over two years while researching Back to Blood. He has said that writers should "leave the desk" in order to gather material for their books, and he admires nineteenth-century naturalistic novelists like Balzac and Zola for having done so. What are some of this novel's memorable details that could have been learned and conveyed only by Wolfe's direct observation? Would you know how the neighborhood of Hialeah looks or what really goes on at the Biscayne Bay Columbus Day Regatta if he hadn't been there and told us?
3. One reviewer noted that Back to Blood is both "a breezy, funny read...and an examination of what it means to be a man." In what ways did you sympathize with Nestor Camacho as he struggles with his various identities as a cop, a Cuban American, and a young man on his own? Did you expect the happy endings for both his career and his love life?
4. Ghislaine Lantier's French Haitian American father is horrified by the prospect of his daughter's dating "a Cuban cop!" Discuss the ways in which Professor Lantier manifests both the meaning of the novel's title and the more general theme of people's strong drive to fit in and rise.
5. In an interview, Tom Wolfe has said, "People may complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that's the way people think. They don't think in essays." Does this strike you as true?
6. How do your thoughts about "de-skilled," "hands-free" art jibe with the narrator's? Were you aware of how much money was at stake in the current art world before reading Wolfe's rendition of Art Basel Miami? Did you know about the business of forgery in the art world?
7. Novelist Tibor Fischer, in a review of Back to Blood, wrote that "for bringing the world, or at least a world, to the page, Wolfe is the boss." And the books editor of the Miami Herald wrote that "flamboyance is Miami's native tongue....There is nothing in this novel that couldn't happen." Do these comments about the veracity of Back to Blood make you want to visit Miami or run the other way? Do you consider place ormilieu to be important to your enjoyment of a novel? Discuss.
8. Magdalena Otero takes many chances with her well-being in her constant striving to assimilate and move up in Miami's pecking order. Which of the minor characters also exhibit her preoccupation with status? Can you think of any who don't? Discuss social ambition as a theme of Back to Blood.
9. Tom Wolfe has said that one of the writers he most admires is John Steinbeck. Although the work of these two writers differs stylistically, both attest to Wolfe's belief that "no single organism could be understood without observing and comprehending the entire colony." What is your response to that idea? How strongly do you think the individual is shaped by his society?

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Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3.5
( 46 )
Rating Distribution

5 Star

(16)

4 Star

(8)

3 Star

(5)

2 Star

(6)

1 Star

(11)

Your Rating:

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See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 46 Customer Reviews

  • Posted November 14, 2012

    more from this reviewer

    I've been a Wolfe fan since the 1960s. In BtoB, the author displ

    I've been a Wolfe fan since the 1960s. In BtoB, the author displays a wonderful condensation of his skills. Perhaps like good wine, age improves storytellers. I can't imagine a more engaging, enjoyable romp through the craziness of the colliding ethnicities and cultures of Miami. His characters are easily accessible. Folks you probably know. Their motivations may be convoluted and their accents a struggle, but at no time during my time with this book, despite some really creative situations, did I find myself saying, "No way!" As odd as some of the interactions get, none felt contrived or not true to the character.

    Back to Blood is a tale of expectations -- both the ones fulfilled, and the ones that slip away. It's loud, raw and absorbing.

    Mr. Wolfe treats this major city like one might treat an old friend, with lots of quirks and issues, but still someone to be loyal to. A great deal of research and time on the ground must have gone into this book and it shows. I recommend it to anyone with a taste for Florida's sunshine, rum drinks and a skeptical sense when it comes to fine art and/or ethnicity.

    4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted November 6, 2012

    This book is irreverent, definitely not PC, tongue-in-cheek, pok

    This book is irreverent, definitely not PC, tongue-in-cheek, poking fun at the extremes of characters, but loads of romping fun. You just have to let yourself get into the excess that is the Miami he is writing about. You will either love it or hate it. For those who read Wolfe's "A Man in Full" and loved it, you will probably love this one too. Beneath it all are some characters who actually have morals and personal strength. Have fun!

    3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted November 9, 2012

    I love Tom Wolfe! His writing is so alive and descriptive. Thi

    I love Tom Wolfe! His writing is so alive and descriptive. This book is no different. His use of written sound effects get you right into the action. And his character descriptions make you feel like you're standing right next to the person. I've read several of his books and they're always fun to read, but there are also social commentaries that bring it down to earth. I didn't find Back to Blood as biting as Bonfire of the Vanities, but there is still much to enjoy. And I did.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 23, 2012

    Not sure

    Cant seem to get through the stupid comments mad by the characters that are far from developed

    2 out of 9 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted December 6, 2012

    I DID read this all the way through but I also did a LOT of skim

    I DID read this all the way through but I also did a LOT of skimmimg. Ended up being glad I got it from the library & did NOT purchase. Would not recommend to my "reader" friends.

    1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted December 3, 2012

    This book is just sad. First of it gets Miami wrong - the Cuban

    This book is just sad. First of it gets Miami wrong - the Cubans, the Jews, the Russians, the Haitians, are all Primitives and it is only the two WASP characters who understand the whole picture. There is no world, not in Miami, nor anywhere else where the Cubans wander around all day saying Dios Mio and the Jews say everything backwards and the African American police chief is just all African American and nothing else.

    The writing is tediously bombastic and the characters have no depth nor any context. It might have worked as a graphics novel but it really just reads like a Miami Based parody of "Bonfire".

    There is a great story to be told about the strange melange of Miami but Wolfe doesn't get it at all.

    1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 12, 2012

    Just ok

    Not as good as his others.


    1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 10, 2013

    Worst Novel in many years

    What a waste of my time. Since I was dumb enough to buy this book I felt obligated to finish it. The book needs less wordy description, more story, and some attempt at editing, (wires holding up a sailboat mast are "stays" not "cables." ) The ending is weak; something you would expect from a first time novelist.

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  • Posted March 3, 2013

    more from this reviewer

    Like another reviewer I loved A Man in Full.  This is dreadful.

    Like another reviewer I loved A Man in Full.  This is dreadful.  The characters are under developed.  And although I was anxious to get to the end and quit reading the drivel, the ending totally left me hanging.  Nothing was resolved.  It was as if Tom Wolfe was as tired of writing the story as I was of reading it.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted March 2, 2013

    more from this reviewer

    I have known of Tom Wolfe¿s reputation for many years. For whate

    I have known of Tom Wolfe’s reputation for many years. For whatever reason, I had never read one of his novels until this one became available during a Christmas sale on the site of one of my dealers.  Perhaps I need to read one of Mr. Wolfe’s previous novels that helped to create his reputation. After reading this one, I am not at all clear how he has come to be as well respected as a novelist.  I found this work to be overly wordy, weakly plotted, characters that were not well developed and the story was left with little resolution.
    The city of Miami has become a cultural plethora in recent decades.  Peoples from Haiti, Cuba, Central and South America, multiple African nations, Russia and all regions of the United States have relocated to the beauty, opportunity and climate that are Miami.  Each of these groups is interested in “staying with blood” rather than mingling with other cultures.  While this behavior maintains (and further develops) one’s cultural identity, it can also create a climate of suspicion, paranoia and hostility.  The reader is introduced quickly into this world in the early pages of this novel.
    Nestor Camacho is a 25-year-old police officer who is in his first weeks as a part Miami Police Department’s elite Marine Patrol when he is required to remove a man who is sitting atop the 70-foot main mast of a yacht in a marina. This individual, it is later learned, is a Cuban refugee who would be granted asylum immediately upon his setting foot on American dry land.  If a Cuban refugee is apprehended before reaching land, he/she is returned to Cuba.  When Nestor rescues this individual just before he falls from his tall perch (in one of the most bizarre manners imaginable), he his hailed by his fellow police officers as a hero and totally disowned by his family and the Cuban community.  His girlfriend, Magdelena, dumps him so she can openly date her boss, Norman Lewis, a prominent Miami Psychiatrist who specializes in treating Pornography Addiction, an ailment he does not believe exists but who appears to be suffering with that affliction. His “prize” patient is Maurice Fleischmann, a billionaire who makes introduction of Dr. Lewis to the wealthier class of the Miami community.  One of those introductions is to Sergei Korolyov, an obscenely rich Russian “oligarch” whose “generosity” has provided Miami with its first world class art attraction.  How all of these characters are connected is an imaginative stretch for the reader but it is also the core of the book.
    This book could have been much better had it been better edited.  The author seems to go on the theory of, “Why use one word when five would suffice?” and goes to extremes in describing minor elements (such as listing ten different Solo Cup colors one of the characters saw on a yacht and repeatedly “echoing” mixed in conversations) that cause the book to be frustratingly slow and serve no other apparent purpose.  The book would have been better had it been better edited but Mr. Wolfe would have needed to tighten the plot dramatically for the book to be a good read.  The plot has little focus and the resolution is far too open-ended as well as having the feel of the author (finally) finding a place to stop writing.
    I was disappointed in my first visit with this author.  I would need to be convinced to read another of his works.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 16, 2013

    Can I be Liz?

    Plz?

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 6, 2013

    Excellent, could not put it down.

    Tom Wolf is a great American author. Bonfire of the Vanities is my favorite book, Back to Blood is another great novel. I was upset when I finished because I wanted to read more. I couldn't put this book down, I'd fall asleep reading it & start reading again when I wake up at night.
    Wolf with his acurate portrait of our time is a modern day Dickens.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 5, 2013

    I found the characters unsympathetic, unpleasant, and under deve

    I found the characters unsympathetic, unpleasant, and under developed. The overuse of repetitive words and phrases was just plain annoying. Annoying...annoying...annoying.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 3, 2013

    Someone

    How do we know ur two ppl if ur only on one nook. Creep

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 3, 2013

    Jessica

    Laghed

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 4, 2013

    Erica and Jake

    They both smile at their daughters

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  • Posted January 12, 2013

    "A Man in Full" is in my Top 10 of all time.  I grew u

    "A Man in Full" is in my Top 10 of all time.  I grew up in Miami and could not wait to read this book.  I thought about quitting after 50 pages and wish I would have.  I think Tom has lost his magic.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 28, 2012

    Interesting but different

    Somehow couldn't stop reading this book, as I have read all of his. However, this one had repetitive odd words to indicate sound effects and odd punctuation. I found it completely took me out of the story and it was highly irritating. I don't know if I would have read it if I had known beforehand. The characters were also not very fully drawn, and most completely unlikable. I'm quite ambivalent about this book.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 23, 2012

    Misty

    "For now. You can go expolre "

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 20, 2012

    Disappointing

    Good beginning then it drags. It gets moving again toward the end before falling on its face!

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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