Product Description

These days, entertainers no longer just entertain: they advocate dubious 'religions', work for the United Nations, get face-time with heads of state and monopolise problems they are infinitely qualified to solve - problems like Africa, the Middle East, and AIDS. We stand at the beginning of a bright new chapter in human history. Feast your eyes, then, on Sharon Stone's peace mission to Israel, on a world where Angelina Jolie advises on the Iraqi reconstruction effort or Charlie Sheen analyses 9/11, and in which Jude Law's attempts to establish contact with the Taliban are reported without irony. "Celebrity" is a roadmap, a survivalist's guide, a Rosetta Stone for our times: without a copy you are not equipped to engage with the world...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57295 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Jonathan Freedland (a.k.a. thriller writer Sam Bourne)
Marina Hyde exposes one of the strangest aspects of contemporary culture: the emergence of often bird-brained celebrities as our new priesthood, dispensing wisdom and performing good works.

She skewers a procession of these starry saviours, and does it with an acid wit that will have you laughing out loud more often than is healthy. If you like sharp, funny and super-smart, Marina Hyde is your woman.

Metro
`frequently hilarious, with incredibly bleak undertones'

Scotland on Sunday, Chitra Ramaswamy
`Damn good fun. It's a brilliant read, a surreal whistle-stop tour through the rogues' gallery of 21st century celebrities.

Customer Reviews

Genius
Hilarious. Hyde nails our bizarre elevation of entertainers into UN spokespeople, unqualified medical advisers and pushers of alien religions. Some of the stories seem too extraordinary to be true, but check them out and apparently they are. Madonna hijacking UN headquarters to help Gucci sell handbags, Angelina Jolie allowing Namibia's borders to be shut to journalists so she could give birth, congressional committees calling Elmo from Sesame Street to testify, etc etc. Loved it.

Brilliant - wish someone had written this 10 years ago, then we may not be living in such a mad world!
If you like Marina Hyde's column in The Guardian, you are going to LOVE this. It is hilarious, but rather worryingly the book's entire content is actually 100% true. How on earth have celebrities got away with this kind of stuff for so long?! I can tell you one thing for free, I will NEVER buy a copy of Heat magazine or the like ever again. Celebrities are truly vile and we need to stop them from taking over the world any more than they already have!

Stool to the left, stool to the right, arse on the floor.
"In a world..." in which the grossly inflated egos of our superstars have broken free of their entertainment-land moorings and are looming large over the news-sphere, Marina Hyde - the snarkiest heckler on the back row - holds the corrective pin. With withering sarcasm and baffled incredulity, she shows who's crossed the line, who can no longer see the line, and who has never even heard of the concept of the line. But fan as I am of her newspaper columns on this subject, I felt this book was a missed opportunity from a talented writer. It's neither consistently funny enough as a work of humour, nor sufficient as a piece of thought-provoking analysis, when it is within Hyde's grasp to have achieved both.

Reading this book I was reminded of something Eric Idle said about the last Python film, The Meaning of Life. He said that in retrospect he felt it had been one draft away from a masterpiece, specifically he regretted that they had left it as a series of short films bundled together and hadn't linked the strands in a stronger way. That's also the problem I had with this book, in which Hyde takes on celebrities one topic-chapter at a time without managing to hang it all together as a satisfying whole.

It starts out with a chapter on 'Celebrities and the War on Terror' that feels like it was hurriedly tacked-on (perhaps at the publisher's request?), as it reads like a brief collection of her Guardian columns. It is however very funny and luckily after that the chapters are more pleasingly essay-like - but sadly the hilarity is sacrificed.

Don't get me wrong, it's fairly amusing and interesting and Hyde is a good writer but I was expecting much more from this book. It felt too diffuse, didn't come to any conclusions. She comes up with some great images now and then, like the "Frankenstein's celebrity" made up of different star-bits, but in the case of this book the monster does not come to life. Hyde takes aim at the celebrity mags near the end and this hints at what could have been - a rounded analysis of celeb culture, it's causes and effects - but in the event it just seems a bit schizophrenic. The question of why we feel the need to exalt entertainers to such pedestals is not addressed, nor why we seek to knock them down. Take the case of Pitt and Jolie closing off the borders of Namibia for the birth of their child: Hyde is affronted and pours scorn, but fails to examine why this course of action seemed reasonable and necessary to the celebs concerned. I also would have liked some analysis of how and why celebrity culture has exponentially grown over the years.

A few more problems: I think she is sometimes guilty of that Daily Show thing of pouncing on remarks that people have come out with on the spot and treating them like cast-iron policy positions. To my mind she is shockingly harsh on Sean Penn when, in a fairly glib aside, she strongly implies that he let people die in the Hurricane Katrina floods so a photographer could take up a seat on his rescue boat - by far the most outrageous accusation in the book. There are comedy footnotes throughout - a good idea, but it's one joke and becomes woefully unfunny after the first couple of times. She even has a pop at "ironists" who make up words like "Celebutante" and "Sublebrity" - this is basically her own shtick! Also it seems a bit Americanised - only people who are famous across the pond get a look in (Pete Doherty is briefly mentioned, but he is explained as Kate Moss's former boyfriend not as a Babyshambles/Libertines musician) and there is a reference to "Where's Waldo?" It's not a big deal but it does add to the suspicion that there may have been publishers breathing down her neck interfering too much with what kind of book we got.

It's not a terrible book by any stretch of the imagination, it's diverting, amusing, a lot of it is interesting. I would advise any celebrities to carry around a copy and study it, learn to avoid a few Pitt-falls. I think it will become a more interesting document as time goes on as it is essentially just a run-down of crazy celebrity antics of the last few years - it will seem a fascinating snapshot of the age. I'm just disappointed Hyde didn't do a few more drafts and make it the masterpiece she's capable of.