The Bonfire of the Vanities.

WOLFE, Tom [Madeleine K. Albright].

$300.00

Item Number: 147422

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987.

Second printing of the author’s first novel. Octavo, original publisher’s half cloth, bookplate to the front pastedown from “The Private Collection of Secretary Madeleine K. Albright.” The collector, Madeleine K. Albright, was the first woman to serve as the U.S. Secretary of State. She acted under President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001, leading the United States through foreign policy in the Middle East with the endorsement of military action in Iraq. At the 1998 NATO summit, Albright coined the “3 Ds” of NATO, “which is no diminution of NATO, no discrimination and no duplication – because I think that we don’t need any of those three “Ds” to happen.” After her tenure as Secretary of State, she served as chair of the consulting Albright Stonebridge Group and was the Michael and Virginia Mortara Endowed Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. For Albright’s contributions to foreign policy and relations that defined a century, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Near fine in a near fine price- clipped dust jacket. Jacket design by Fred Marcellino.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is a novel, but it is based on the same sort of detailed on-scene reporting as Wolfe's great nonfiction bestsellers, The Right Stuff, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And it is every bit as eye-opening in its achievements. It is a big, panoramic story of the metropolis-the kind of fiction strangely absent from our literature in the second half of this century-that reinforces Tom Wolfe's reputation as the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America. "A big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book that grabs you by the lapels and won't let go" (The New York Times Book Review).