Back to Blood
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2.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The Bonfire of the Vanities author, Tom Wolfe, ingeniously dissects the turbulent heart of America’s racial vortex in this exhilarating tale of sweltering Miami
As the police boat speeds across Miami’s Biscayne Bay, the scene is set for Officer Nestor Camacho’s great moment of heroism. Except that in this feverous melting pot of a city, Nestor's one act of heroism can be seen as an utter betrayal of his Cuban roots.
As Nestor’s world disintegrates – his family disowns him, he can’t get a Cuban coffee without ugly stares, and his girlfriend Magdalena leaves him for her sex-addiction psychiatrist boss – his quest to right the wrongs brings him into contact with the full panorama of modern Miami. The Cuban mayor, a Yale-marinated journalist, the black police chief, the clueless baying art-buyers and an Anglo billionaire porn addict all come up for scrutiny in Tom Wolfe’s high-energy, scrupulous and hilarious reckoning with our times.
‘Back to Blood dazzles so much that you might want to read it through dark glasses’ – Independent on Sunday
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 expos of popular culture so much as a lurid compendium of clich s. 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 migr s, 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.
Customer Reviews
Back to blood
Not his best book.