Tom Wolfe’s The Pump House Gang: A Micro-Review

Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash

Man, my wife is going to kill me, but it wasn’t my fault.

Audible ran a killer deal on Cyber Monday. I mean, Thomas Sowell books for $2.43! That’s not even fair.

But now I’m waiting for the screeches when the credit card bill arrives.

Fortunately, I’ll be wearing my Bose noise-canceling headphones with the door to my library securely locked, listening to one of the many audiobooks I bought this past week.

So far, I’m mostly listening to Tom Wolfe’s The Pump House Gang. It’s a collection of essays about the 1960s.

I enjoy reading about the 1960s and 1970s. It fills in vagaries that flitted through my little brain from the TV, radio, and overhearing adult conversations during the first 12 years of my life.

There’s something particularly enjoyable reading about those decades in pieces like Wolfe’s (and Hunter Thompson’s) that were written at the time. I don’t know what it is. Some of their contemporaneous observations are ludicrous in hindsight; some are remarkably insightful; all are entertaining.

And sometimes, you get fascinating nuggets, like Wolfe’s observation that the Pump House Gang (a group of rough surfers) traveled into Watts during the 1965 riots. Why did they go? Because they knew the media was…