Quote:
| Masters of the Universe still run New York Violent districts have been gentrified but, 20 years after The Bonfire of the Vanities, rich white bankers are even richer, reports Paul Harris Sunday December 16, 2007 The Observer Robert Thompson remembers vividly what happened when he opened The Bonfire of the Vanities, the chronicle of Eighties New York that captured the city as a decaying cauldron of racial and social division, poised to boil over into disaster. 'I just sat down and kept on reading. I didn't get up until I had finished. He captured that moment of time so well,' said Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. Thompson was not alone. Twenty years ago this month Tom Wolfe's novel hit American bookstores and became both a literary sensation and a cultural landmark. It was a tale of how a wrong turning in the Bronx plunged rich white banker Sherman McCoy into a maelstrom of racial strife and skulduggery. |
