Rating: 
Summary: Hilarity and Intellectual Acuity...
Review: "It appears that the Streisand throne is being usurped by the morbidly shrivelled and schoolmarmish likes of Celine Dion, who, despite her sexual handicap of being the most wholly repellent woman ever to sing songs of love, totally capsized the vocal world by trembling with pain over the eye-bleeding TITANIC ballad, at one point the #1 favourite song of weepy teenagers and pan flautists all over the world." Page after page contains side-splitting truths that any intelligent pop-culture afficianado (no, the two are not mutually exclusive) will relish. BUY IT, and weep with joy and mirth.
Rating: 
Summary: Imagine that...
Review: A book all about our ABSOLUTELY FAVORITE CELEBRITIES that lets us feel morally superior! I can't wait for the movie!
Rating: 
Summary: Cintra Wilson is as sharp as a razor
Review: A massive swelling is chock full of shockingly perceptive insights that are described with sharp, surgical, and witty remarks that will leave you gasping at each sentence. As an example she states that fame trained its laser eye on Micheal Jackson and fried his brain to a crisp. So much has been written and said about Michael Jackson but Cinta manages to sum it up so sharply and suscinctly. This is just one sentence but pretty much all of them are quotable.
Rating:
Summary: short, sharp, brilliant
Review: Among Cintra Wilson, David Sedaris, and Joe Queenan, I feel my dark heart is finally being channeled and revealed. This book is laugh-aloud funny, spot-on social commentary to scour our smarmy, collective perceptions and foibles cleaner than any upper colonic. It's not for the faint-hearted nor those who wish to remain deluded, but for everyone else it's a relief, like the collective popping of every helium balloon-headed star. She is way too young to be this wise and way too American to be so well-educated and cable of processing her thoughts. And may she continue writing for the rest of the long life she has to live, providing some movie star or the city of LA doesn't put out a hit on her.
Rating: 
Summary: A Massive Mediocrity
Review: Cindra Wilson hates Celine Dion and the New Kids on the Block. Gee, she sure has carved out a unique niche. Her utterly mundane worldview would be at least mildly entertaining if she could write. But here's a typical passage:
"As you can see, the deep, widespread, and dangerous hysteria a seemingly inconsequential boy band can spread is absolutely staggering, and all the more depressing since the driving push behind the whole teen music deal is groteque wealth."
Driving push? Teen music deal? This isn't an isolated example. This is how she writes. Some reviewers have compared her to Dorothy Parker. As a writer, she more closely resembles Parker Stevenson. Or as Wilson herself might put it: the writing stuff in this book like thing kind of [is not good].
Rating:
Summary: A Great Literary Stylist--With Attitude
Review: Cintra is a girl who's into barbs, not barbies. She takes on Holywood, literary blockbusters, Olympic figure skating, and various other topics. In the tradition of the great American curmudgeons, like H. L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker, Cintra skewers and roasts her subjects, but with her own distinctive and colorful gonzo prose. Stylistically she heaps adjective upon adjective in great, teetering sentence structures, like a starved person piling food on her plate at an all-you-can eat banquet. The resulting rant is hilarious. But Cintra is not just a satirist. At heart she's a moralist--a hip, smart, post-feminist one.
Rating: 
Summary: Should Include a Disclaimer...
Review: Cintra is my favorite columnist in Salon magazine, and I was really looking forward to this book. I was disappointed, however, to discover that most of the book consists of material that has already appeared in Salon (and can still be read by accessing her archived columns). Although I don't regret buying the book, I'm a little surprised that it doesn't include a disclaimer that it "contains previously published material" or something to that effect.
Rating:
Summary: Massively Unsatisfying
Review: Cintra Wilson is a hilarious writer. There's no doubt about it. She takes on her topic with scathing snark. She is apoplectic about the celebrity culture that has consumed America, but she does too much finger pointing (her middle one) and not enough analysis of the reasons why save impugning the "maladjusted, bacon-eating" rural and suburban population that isn't as erudite as her and her cocktail set, which she loathes as well. Also missing is an alternative aside from Stop, and Don't watch, don't look anymore, Stop feeding the monster with your infatuation. And too often she comes off as an ersatz Camille Paglia and as someone incapable of dealing with what David Foster Wallace calls "the hazards of freedom". For someone who proclaims to be ultra-liberal and Green-blooded Ms. Wilson is one of the most intolerant people I've ever read, yet I did laugh with her, and after reflecting what I read I laugh at her and her misery. But, hey, she has to be applauded for voicing her opinion that Napalm be dropped on Los Angeles. I second that.
Rating:
Summary: If Sedaris is Cider, She's All Vinegar
Review: Cintra Wilson will have like minded individuals quaking with laughter, leaving anyone of a conservative bent dumb-founded and angry, no doubt. Despite the pointed focus of the title, the emphasis is firmly on "other cultural revelations," reading like a loose collection of previous articles by the cannon known as Cintra. A Regurgitation of American Culture might've been a more apt title, such is the force of her words at times. Published in 2000, it's a bit dated now but still worth a read. Though subjects like Miss America and female gymnasts feel oft-visited, Wilson's words are so fresh they're practically crisp. Though Wilson puts some effort into justifying her sour, at times beyond black, tone as a necessary political means, she doesn't entirely convince. In fact, the only disappointment is that this doesn't build to a more specific and prescriptive conclusion. No matter--it doesn't have to. Wilson is a confident enough writer to tell us all about Kato Kaelin's birthday party without ever feeling the need to explain in detail what she was doing there in the first place. Ya gotta love that.
Rating:
Summary: Never read anything like this before: stiletto-commentary!
Review: Cintra Wilson, a former, longstanding columnist for the "San Francisco Examiner" with a substantial cult following, has produced her first book, a series of satirical essays on celebrities and our cultural obsession with them. Wilson nails down the essential creepiness of true fandom with the inclusion of such artifacts as an entirely genuine boxful of inadvertently deliriously funny fanmail for "New Kids on the Block": the tragically illiterate x-rated writings of desperate, usually suburban, adult women to teenage boys. Her observations appear in chapter-length discussions of Elvis in Vegas; the ever more bizarre persona of Michael Jackson and its psycho-sexual origins; and the LA and New York commonplace of the rabidly, shamelessly ambitious aspiring actor, who defines degradation down in a quest for fame. Wilson argues that celebrity culture is not only toxic to the egos and even physical well-being of celebrities, but also to ordinary folk, ceaselessly encouraged to regard their own lives as inherently shabbier and less important, going undocumented in gossip columns and tabloids. Wilson's rages at celebrity culture are startlingly real, and produce unforgettably, cruelly funny putdowns of figures from divas Barbra Streisand and Celine Dion, to Siegfried & Roy, as the quintessence of the degraded Las Vegas performer. One can only wonder at what private events befell Wilson to produce this magnificent fury at the fame machine, and a wild attack on its cogs and wheels. Easily one of the most uproarious and literate works of pop cultural commentary available. Wilson is a true original.
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