Dupont University: the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition....Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina, who has come here on full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.
As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite, her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's god-like basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turn of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus, she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.
With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler.
 Write a Review of I Am Charlotte Simmons
 
Tom Wolfe Goes to College, September 03, 2006
Reviewer: LOLDavid
from Los Angeles, California
The best parts of this book are when Charlotte Simmons isn't around. Tom Wolfe basically embodies himself in the main character Charlotte Simmons, correcting people on their grammar, lambasting people for their swears and sexual innuendos, muttering inside jokes in Latin, and basically spoiling all fun of modern day college life. Even if you're a rather conservative youth of today, you're not going around correcting your peers.
When it's just Wolfe writing about the boys hanging out in the novel then he's at his best capturing all the slang, details, and hilarity of dumb college boys. But amongst all the vulgarity the story turns somewhat trashy as it examines the melodrama of Charlotte's freshman life. Dylan Baker's narration is excellent. Charlotte's transformation by the end of the novel is interestng & quite abrupt probably due to the severe abridgement but I couldn't listen to 30+ hours of this, so abridged is the way to go for this one.
- LearnOutLoud.com Product ID:
I004796
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