The Bonfire of the Vanities

What Hacker News says

1. BostonianAug 2025
   https://archive.is/676aO

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   The best writers don’t only keep you engaged with a gripping tale. They will, under the guise of that compelling narrative, teach you more about human motivation that lies at the base of everything in politics, business and life itself.

   Fiction engages the emotions as well as the intellect in a way very little nonfiction can. The ease with which stories become embedded in the memory also gives a novelist the edge. We are much more likely to remember a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end than a list of valuable instructions. While I can barely remember a page from my undergraduate textbooks, I can still recount stories I learned as a child.

   The good novel exploits the virtues of storytelling to capture a truth. I doubt there is as good a nonfiction book that conveys the reality of the life, economics and politics of New York in the 1980s as well as Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” You can read as many guides to living your best life as you wish, but I defy you to find a better account of the travails of love, happiness, faith and morals as Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.” Histories of the Cold War are fine, but nothing portrays the moral ambiguities and complexities of geopolitics as effectively as John le Carré’s novels of the age. (Though not his later ones, where the espionage-era paranoia that had entered his soul descended into generic anti-Western, anticapitalist tropes as tiresome as any critical theory textbook.) Booth Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons” is as good a portrait of 20th-century American capitalism as any economics treatise. If you think you’ve only just discovered technology’s corrosive effect on the human spirit, read Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” from 1932.

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2. fancyfredbotAug 2024
   Tom Wolfe is an absolutely incredible author. Bonfire of the vanities in particular is an amazing read which the film adaptation only barely begins to do justice to. I also think that both A Man in Full and Back to Blood are amazing novels. The thing these books do is bring the fight for status into sharp focus while also remaining very true to life. After reading them you start to see it everywhere and it helps you to understand the actions people take in your own life. Highly recommended.
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3. billfruitDec 2023
   Sometimes there still is, for example Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities goes into great depths into how bond markets work.

   Also James Michener novels are a good introduction to the history of different geographical location.

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4. roenxiMay 2021
   When exactly is the period of time we're looking to that wasn't an age of decadence? Everyone always seems to be writing about an age of decadence. We've been in an age of decadence since the Dutch East India Company figured out how to generate/relocate enough wealth to Europe that wealthy people could afford to be properly decadent.

   1900 was an age of decadence, 1920 was an age of decadence, 1940 was an age of horrors so horrific Europe basically collapsed. 1960s were extremely decadent but it was a bit more broad-based. The 1980s were decadent (I recommend Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities). 2000 was maybe unusually sedate? Probably it was decadent and I didn't notice. 2020 is decadent and I am not surprised.

   The times don't change all that much.

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5. wolverine876May 2021
   >>> 1900 was an age of decadence, 1920 was an age of decadence, 1940 was an age of horrors so horrific Europe basically collapsed. 1960s were extremely decadent but it was a bit more broad-based. The 1980s were decadent (I recommend Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities). 2000 was maybe unusually sedate? Probably it was decadent and I didn't notice. 2020 is decadent and I am not surprised.

   >>> The times don't change all that much.

   That doesn't sound philosophically or factually rigorous, nor particularly true in many ways, nor like something that reflects any razor-like precision.

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6. dnissleyJun 2020
   > They have a problem with their employer, and are being heard in the court of public opinion. Why is that "a bummer"?

   The court of public opinion doesn't have a good track record, for one. It's decisions are often based on fashion more than any kind of ethical principles.

   A classic exploration of this phenomenon is contained in the novel The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.

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