Man in Full by Tom WolfeMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I give four stars for such a readable, large novel: it read fast and easy as half its nearly eight hundred pages. Also bolstering my high esteem is the core plot element as stoicism as a real-world philosophy to find sanity and calm in high and low places, drawing heavily on (with quotations) from The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers: The Complete Extant Writings of Epicurus, Epictetus, Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius by Whitney J. Oates.
I can't go five stars for the unsubtle irony of Conrad as carer to Conrad, etc. the pulling off the shelf of such a deus ex machina as an earthquake and prisoner-passing-as-soldier.
Finally, while Wolfe has (no surprise) pitch-perfect depiction of white southern dialect and phrasing, his courageous leap in black dialect -- including rap lyrics -- falses short of sounding real and is instead even cartoonish at times.
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