The bonfire of the vanities / Tom Wolfe
by Tom Wolfe
Narrated by Joe Barrett
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
If you've ever suspected that ambition, race, and money are all tangled together in ways nobody admits, Wolfe spends 27 hours proving it — loudly.
- Great if you want: razor-sharp satire of class, race, and 1980s New York excess
- Listening experience: dense and novelistic — rewards patience, punishes multitasking
- Narration: Barrett handles the sprawling ensemble with distinct, credible New York voices
- Skip if: you want plot momentum over social dissection
Listen to The bonfire of the vanities / Tom Wolfe on Audible →
About This Audiobook
Sherman McCoy is a Wall Street bond trader with a Park Avenue apartment and a sense of himself as a Master of the Universe, until a wrong turn in the Bronx and a hit-and-run accident set in motion a chain of catastrophes involving prosecutors, politicians, activist clergy, the tabloid press, and the machinery of racial politics in 1980s New York. Tom Wolfe's debut novel is a savage satire of ambition, race, and media spectacle that remains one of the defining portraits of late-twentieth-century American life.
Joe Barrett brings enormous range to a novel that requires him to voice a vast Manhattan ensemble, from Park Avenue wives to Bronx prosecutors to tabloid journalists. His Sherman McCoy is perfectly calibrated, privileged and oblivious in exactly the way the satire demands. At over twenty-seven hours, this is one of the longer literary fiction audiobooks in the catalog, and Barrett's energy and precision sustain it throughout.
