upon gaining material wealth, physical pleasure, and a well-placed social status; academics are only important insofar as they help achieve these goals. Research Wolfe took the name "Dupont University" from Dupont Hall, one of the halls where classes are held at his alma mater, Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. The school discussed in the book appears to be an amalgamation of several elite universities. Wolfe denies that the book is fully based on Duke, from which his daughter Alexandra graduated in 2002. The fictional "St. Ray's" fraternity is most certainly based upon University of Pennsylvania's St. Anthony Hall, or "St. A's," where Wolfe attended several events researching for the book, "St. A's" being on Penn's Locust Walk, with fictional "St. Ray's" residing on Wolfe's "Ladding Walk." The basketball star, Jojo Johanssen, is a jock/celebrity character, derived from colleges like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Kentucky, Duke, Stanford, Indiana University and the University of Florida, where, in Wolfe's perception, student athletes are treated as superior. At the time of publication, JJ Redick was a prominent white basketball player at Duke University. There is also a reference in the book to a freshman dormitory "Giles", which is an actual freshman dorm at Duke University. Besides college life, athletics, and youth sex culture, another major theme that also began in Hooking Up is Tom Wolfe's interest in neuroscience, specifically the relationship between brain chemistry and free will. Simmons is exposed to questions about inevitability and genetics by her professor Dr. Victor Ransome Starling. (At Washington & Lee James Holt Starling, Ph.D. was a faculty member from 1942 to 1983, a biology professor from 1951 to 1983 and a former head of the Biology Department.) In the context of the book, questions of free will are posed by the characters' various dramas as Charlotte decides whether or not she will adopt the sexual norms of campus life and Johanssen attempts to become a better student and more disciplined person generally. Despite the main characters seemingly confirming the science of inevitability, two side characters (Adam Gellin and Hoyt) are both altered considerably by a chance encounter with a presidential candidate. Reception Reviewer Jacob Weisberg of The New York Times wrote "Wolfe is always showing us something we haven't quite noticed. But after three thick novels and a novella (surely he will never write a short story), the issue