The book event of 1998 was A Man In Full. I bought the hefty tome the week it shelved. I then lent it to my mother, who tells me it's great. When she's done with it I hope to read it.

Before there was Wolfe the Novelist, there was Wolfe the Cultural Observer. This week marks the 29th anniversary of a fund-raiser held at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein's Park Avenue duplex for the Black Panther Party's Defense Fund, the centerpiece of my favorite of Wolfe's essays, "Radical Chic". Published in the book Radical Chic & Mau Mauing The Flak Catchers, the third in a trilogy of 60's essays including The Pump House Gang and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby, Wolfe, in addition to coining a phrase, isolated and tore to shreds every level of New York Society.

From the opening page, Wolfe drags you by the hand to a corner of the decorated-to-look-undecorated living room to whisper in your ear. You're shown how to tell old money from new money, media money from bank money, Jewish money from WASP money, who's there out of guilt, genuine interest, curiosity or to be seen. Wolfe's descriptions are so rich you can see the bright op-art paintings on the wall.

After a brief description of the awkward history New York Society and philanthropy have shared throughout the ages, we are invited to enter the wholly new and bizarre world of Radical Chic, where the super (nouveau) rich, drawn either by a dormant empathy or a desire to look fashionable, try to find the most left wing and non tax deductible way to buy good publicity. It starts with friendly causes like Caesar Chavez and the grape pickers, with roots in nice New Deal ethics even your mother would love, and ends with the most fearsome of Maoist Black Isolationists, The Black Panthers. Which brings us to Lenny's house.

Hors d'oevres are offered by white servants, so as not to offend the guests. In attendance, Otto Preminger, Barbara Walters, Mrs. Richard Avedon, Mrs. Sidney Lumet, Mrs. Harry Belafonte (who, despite being white, is referred to by the Panthers as "Sister"), and the sons and daughters of the wealthiest bankers in New York, well tanned and toned and lovingly dubbed The Beautiful People. All there to listen to armed black men ask for money so they can then go on and destroy the system, by any means necessary.

Not there, of course, is Tom Wolfe, which makes it such a fascinating study. Each "Right on!" uttered is done so in Wolfe's oft-copied novelistic style, which was so friggin' new back in the day, magazine legal departments hardly knew how to litigate for it. Wolfe's form is just the paradoxical icing on this outrageously contradictory cake. Written in his trippy, the-devil-with-grammar style, weaving in and out of POV's, this piece, while looking like a genuine left-wing 60's artifact, is, under the surface, fraught with right-wing paranoia and common (dollars and) sense cynicism.

It's a great story. The specifics of the politics are now irrelevant (how many are still enraged over the death of Fred Hampton, or the Soviet Union's backing of the UAR?) but the broad strokes remain valid. Like the description of the living room at the head of the story, this essay drags you by the hand right into the thick of one of the most grave (and absurd) 60's parlour discussions, with clarity, insight and humor. I only wish Wolfe would pop of one of these every few months between decade-defining novels.