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I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe

Thread ID: 16260 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2005-01-11

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Faust [OP]

2005-01-11 03:14 | User Profile

I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe

Sounds like a very very depressing book that comes to a bad end. I went half crazy after half a year at large University, So this book just seems all too true to me. I hid out in the near empty(of people) library to read books most of the time. The Theo Tait article almost made me cry. If I had been a girl and had such as happened to Charlotte Simmons; I do not think I would have Survived. I have not read the book(and I am not going to) so I have no idea on the details of it.

I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe

Dupont University--the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition . . . Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time. As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus--she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives. With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler.

[url]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374281580/vdare/103-5102193-4946247[/url]

Tom Wolfe Clear Eye For The Different Human By Steve Sailer

[url]http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050102_wolfe.htm[/url]

Rutrutrutrutrutrutrutrut Theo Tait

[url]http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n01/tait01_.html[/url]


arkady

2005-01-11 13:23 | User Profile

Sounds like amerikan college life hasn't changed substantially since my own school days.


Faust

2005-01-25 23:23 | User Profile

I do not know how this book ends for sure, but it does not look good for the articles I have read. I am not going to read the book. I do not need to read anything to make me more gloomy than I am already.

Here is the way I would have liked to have seen “I Am Charlotte Simmons” end. An undefiled Charlotte Simmons drops out of school at the end of the semester and goes home. The son of the people next door to her childhood home is very happy to see her. They get married and a year later we see a very happy Charlotte Simmons setting in a rocking chair by fire; a little bit pregnant. As she sits knitting an afghan and thinking to her self she is not going to sent her children to a place like that.


Faust

2005-02-15 17:27 | User Profile

From amazon.com: [QUOTE]Hard-Hitting Social Commentary, February 13, 2005 Reviewer: Gary Griffiths (Los Altos Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The fictional Dupont University, showing similarities to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and to Stanford, is the setting for another Topm Wolfe masterpiece, "I am Charlotte Simmons." Charlotte Simmons is a brilliant but naïve, nearly destitute young woman from the remote hills of North Carolina who wins a full scholarship to attend Dupont. That is about all the background necessary for Tom Wolfe to launch into another of his trademarked acerbic dissections of American society, this time aimed at the various strata of university life. Wolfe is not here to judge or advance his own agenda - only to observe. But no target is left unscathed by his rapier wit and his unique ability to expose the irony and inanity of any number of the sacred cows of higher eductaion. Whether it is the hypocrisy of NCAA basketball, the shallow social stratification of fraternity boys and sorority girls, or the sanctimony of the left wing university educratic establishment, all are dispassionately skewered by Wolfe's blistering prose. Even sweet young Charlotte, as she gradually succumbs to the pressures she initially abhors, suffers under Wolfe's inescapable eye. And while she recovers the individuality that made her once so unique and desirable, Wolfe includes in the "new" Charlotte shell of cynicism thick enough to insure she'll never again accept nor be accepted by her humble mountain roots. At some times darkly humorous and at others depressing, "I am Charlotte Simmons" is at all times entertaining; a revealing and powerful expose of campus life in 21st century America. Like "Bonfire of the Vanities" and "A Man in Full" before it, the treasure of "Charlotte" is not in the final destination, but in the journey as seen through Wolfe's keen eye along the way. Tom Wolfe may be America's most insightful chronicler modern society, and "Charlotte Simmons" is another example of the master at the top of his game. Don't miss it. [/QUOTE]

I Am Charlotte Simmons From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Charlotte_Simmons[/url]

And also see related threads:

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[url]http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16737[/url]