Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

Now with an original introduction by David Brooks, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchersis a funny and irreverent study of class and status by the master of New Journalism. Tom Wolfe’s two-act dissection of 1970s race relations in America is incisive and thought-provoking, an indispensable study in how white pieties have often worked against the interests of Black communities in the country. Wolfe first takes readers back to his original hotbed of 1970s “radical chic”: the party for the Black Panthers that Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, hosted at their Park Avenue penthouse. Wolfe’s unerring eye for the uncanny feasts on an improbable scene that would morph into today’s cocktail activism—well-heeled elites signifying their sympathy with causes related to Black emancipation through hobnobbing. “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” meanwhile, unfolds on the other side of the country, in San Francisco’s Office of Economic Opportunity, where Wolfe details with Kafkaesque absurdity the dysfunction, chaos, and corruption that waylays this outgrowth of the War on Poverty so that it inevitably ends up failing the underserved communities it’s supposed to help.