How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

Rating:
Summary: Honest and funny, a teaching book
Review: Toby Young has written a valuable book here, full of insight and pertinent observations. Someone said in a review on this website that they didn't laugh out loud once. I did, several times. It's funny, because Toby makes fun of himself.

But he stays true to his inner nature, and stands against the forces of social society in the New York publishing world.

Toby found that the fashion world, at least with respect to publishing, was based on a religious attitude, a "religion I couldn't take seriously." This religion is based, essentially, on chasing new fads. This isn't surprising, since the publishing world must earn its nickel by selling "news" to the public. It's the same with newspapers in general.

But, as Young cites Tocqueville, "It's an extreme form of materialism....an obsession with bodily pleasures at the expense of the immortal soul." Well, Toby was a non-believer in the Conde Nast world, but from my own perspective, his indictment of the materialistic cravings there could apply all over the country. In fact, it seems that it's inherent in capitalism itself, that is, the pursuit of gain by exchanging value for value. It doesn't hurt the "newness priests" to invent something as new as often as possible.

Toby made many good points like this. He paints himself as a loser and an outsider, and so he probably was, but he finds love in the end and returns to his London home.

I learned much from this book, and I could identify with Toby Young as an outsider and non-believer. Many organizations have the same insider/outsider bifurcation, and those who don't worship in the right way may be ex-communicated pretty quickly.

Toby also addresses the matter of sibling rivalry and competition following us throughout our lives. The book has an index, a rarity these days, and I'm using it right now to find a quote by Gore Vidal, as follows: "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little." Toby adds: "This, in turn explains why we feel a sudden rush of elation on hearing about some terrible calamity that has befallen one of our friends."

And you know, I'm that way, too, but I always believed that I was the only one and had to do everything I could to hide such anti-social feelings. It helped to read this exposition: sibling rivalry throughout life is not that uncommon.

Diximus.




Rating:
Summary: How to Beat to Death an Already Saturated Genre
Review: I'm always up for some self-depracting dark humor. "How to Lose Friends" succeeded on the self-depracting, but was a far miss from the "humor." David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs he is not. I'm not sure if I even cracked a smile once during this read, except maybe when it finally ended. In fact, I actually found myself rooting against this guy in all his attempts at success. Not interesting, not funny, not worth it. Two stars only because of the barely illuminating insight into the world of the NYC magazine industry.

Rating:
Summary: We're just not that into you, Toby
Review: Some one wrote in their review that they'd paid $1.00 for the book. YOU PAID TOO MUCH. The endless "school of hard knocks" routine is beyond tiresome, the crowd Toby longs to be included in is obligingly repulsive and what we're left with is wishing there were some way to return the book for a full refund in order to make a contribution to Toby's permanent extradition from the literary world.

Rating:
Summary: Reverse barometer theory proven again...
Review: I can't remember exactly how I stumbled across this title, but once I saw a used copy for $.99, I knew I had to order it. I simply could not believe that ANYTHING under a buck could be purchased through Amazon! Additionally, other Amazon customers who reviewed the book all seemed to hate it, so I had a feeling the reverse might be true and that I would find Young's book well written and interesting.

Right on both counts - this book IS very well written and easy to read, and most importantly, it's fun! If you're the kind of reader who wonders what it might be like for non-US citzens to move here and work for a major US corporation as the "outsider", you will find this book interesting. The fact that the author is a modern British journalist suddenly working in part of the U.S. media conglomerate was my first clue that I was in for some intelligent reading. Toby Young doesn't apologize for being British and he doesn't cut American culture any slack (although he's secretly in love with it and trying to make sense of it all). The candid language and fast pacing of the chapters makes for easy and entertaining reading as well.

Highly recommended for anyone who reads above a sixth-grade reading level who needs a break from those boring Internet technology manuals that so many of us are forced to read these days in order to keep our jobs...

Two thumbs up!

-->S.

Rating:
Summary: Big promise, little delivery
Review: Let's face it, the appeal of this book is to get a glimpse into the dirty world of celebrity and a glimpse inside the back-stabbing and self-centered society of the publishing world. Well, Toby Young delivers on the self-centered world, especially through his unsympathetic, egocentric and obnoxious self. This book turns out to be about an annoying writer and his rise and fall in the publishing world. Though Young does offer glimpses into the world of publishing and introduces some interesting facts, even these rare gems come across as Young boasting, or making an effort to prove that he's intelligent.

While reading this book, rather than finding an expose into an interesting world, I found an expose of someone I would have no desire to ever meet in person and who I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw him. If he were a horribly dispicable person it would have been far more interesting. Instead, he's just your average every day dispicable person who seems to have always wanted to make his own rules but found that he had to play by others' rules and he wants sympathy for that.

That said, I had to give it three stars because I did finish it, though I nearly put it down for good many times...besides, it got me annoyed enough to put this much thought into it, so there must be some worth there. Perhaps it's meant more for the esoteric world of those in publishing?