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.
Rating: 
Summary: Good stuff, but Keep the Editors Away and Let Cintra Explode
Review: Cintra, your book is good. I realize that your arrival in the world of lit-ur-a-chur requires a somewhat new dynamic, and the overall effect is thoughtful, bristling with your usual insight, and shimmering with your stiletto wit. However, you lose a minor point for rehashing (and barely re-wording) a number of your column bits. (The hilarious Awards-Show-Celine-Being-Controlled-With-Steering-Wheel comes to mind as one of several examples). However, who can blame you for summoning those images again for new readers...they are classic! Otherwise, I find that you've covered some of your familiar territory from many new, scintillating perspectives. Also, the essays in your book lack just a tiny smidge of the raw impact of your columns. In the columns, I sense you hammering on the keyboard with sweat pouring down your face and your pearly whites slowly transmogrifying into Doberman choppers. In the book, I picture you seated behind a mahogany desk in a neon-green leather nightie, typing with nothing but your freshly-painted toenails. I don't know if this was the work of an editor, or your own attempt to give your book-work a more "serious" edge than your column-work. Personally, I take your columns as seriously as a heart attack. They are brilliant. Your book is darn good. Do another soon.
Rating:
Summary: Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain
Review: Culture Critic Cintra gives the new definition to "scathing" you've been wishing for. Live from New York, and unfortunately pitting LA against New York, she walks an endlessly paradoxical razor's edge eating the sour grapes that are the fruits of her own failed attempts at superstardom in Hollywood. Not from the deepest inner circles but as more of a moneyed, Las Vegas visiting insider than she lets on, these essays are exceptionally ruthless and brilliant. Whether she intended it or not, she'll never eat lunch in Hollywood again; with a drug induced rapier mouth with a fundamental tenderness like this, Cintra deserves every watt of the adoring Center of Attention fame she so doggedly seeks. Uneven, but still better than what the doctor ordered, even post 9/11; there are more than enough reasons to give these essays less than five stars, but five stars really aren't enough. Bravo.
Rating:
Summary: Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain
Review: Culture Critic Cintra gives the new definition to "scathing" you've been wishing for. Live from New York, and unfortunately pitting LA against New York, she walks an endlessly paradoxical razor's edge eating the sour grapes that are the fruits of her own failed attempts at superstardom in Hollywood. Not from the deepest inner circles but as more of a moneyed, Las Vegas visiting insider than she lets on, these essays are exceptionally ruthless and brilliant. Whether she intended it or not, she'll never eat lunch in Hollywood again; with a drug induced rapier mouth with a fundamental tenderness like this, Cintra deserves every watt of the adoring Center of Attention fame she so doggedly seeks. Uneven, but still better than what the doctor ordered, even post 9/11; there are more than enough reasons to give these essays less than five stars, but five stars really aren't enough. Bravo.
Rating:
Summary: Celebrity and celebrities sliced and diced
Review: Fame and celebrity are beyond any doubt a huge lure in our society, but the author is absolutely unrelenting in exposing and puncturing the ugly, bloated underside of celebrity and its ramifications. The author primarily targets singers, actors both movie and stage, entertainers, wannabes, chieftains, and the cheerleaders of celebritism for their distorted lives where everyday realities and decencies are ignored and which can proceed in positively obnoxious and harmful directions. The celebrities selected for skewering are hardly surprising. The calamitous lives of Michael and Elvis; the grotesqueness of disfiguring plastic surgery as a means to stay or get on top (see Cher); the unrestrained lewdness of aging Hollywood actors and moguls; and the sleazy, smarmy Las Vegas entertainer, a la Wayne Newton, easily serve to make the point. The broader culture is hardly spared. The hugely deforming and crippling aspects of small girls pursuing fame through sports, namely gymnastics and ice skating, pushed by celebrity hungry parents and coaches is a chilling reminder of the costs of reaching for fame. In addition, the connection between unimaginative entertainment and the promotion of noncontroversial celebrity is examined. Not spared is the unquestioning obsession with celebrities that the broader culture exhibits. Though unfamiliar with her writings, the book seems to be snippets of previous work - probably columns - and does lack the continuity of a more conventional book. Her phraseology is often catchy and original as well as outrageous but at times can be awkward and difficult requiring rereads to grasp the intent. The book is rated fairly highly due to its outrageousness and irreverence towards a phenomenon that needs skewering. A decision to read this book would hinge on one's interest in the dissection of the shenanigans and sicknesses exhibited by mostly show-biz personalities and the broader culture intent on celebrity.
Rating:
Summary: Merry Mocking Mencken-Moderne - Marvellous!
Review: First reading H.L. Mencken - Prejudices, First Series - way back in grad school, I felt as though I were under rhetorical and ideational assault. Over and over again, ambushed by Mencken's relentless pushing prodding needling stratospheric chthonic ribald mocking joyously playful yet deadly serious language, finding it so jaw-droppingly, startlingly funny that I'd be howling out loud at 2 a.m., waking wife, kids, to whom I'd try to read his inimitable raillery against mountebanks, poltroons, Comstockery, "uplift," and the full panoply of the sins and sinners of his age. Mencken's rhetorical excessiveness, his superabundance of sinuous, surprising, jazz-like prose (he wouldn't have liked that simile) thrilled me, made me want more, made me a devotee for life. And after pondering long and hard, the only writer I can today imagine comparing to Mencken is Cintra Wilson - but as a Mencken on a delirious cocktail of speed, acid, extra bile for a less genteel audience, and pther mystery elixirs that may be swirling through the stream of her imagination. But, my God, this is simply startling, uproarious, deadly accurate journalism. It begins with a brilliance of eye. Wilson sees segments of the spectrum that the rest of us are blind to - great journalism begins in great observation. I would quote, extensively, but I don't want to diminish the pleasures of discovery for any who might pick up this book. Let me simply say that Wilson has a long skewer and, impaled like stacked shishkabob, are a long list of deserving (and deservingly easy) victims, icluding Cher, Bruce Willis, Ike Turner, the dancing-singing-boy groups, and Keanu Reeves; surprising appearances by Jack Nicholson, Jack Palance, and others, and, perhaps most unforgettably (and a most timely inclusion), Michael Jackson and "the nose." And, no, this isn't a simple case of status envy: Wilson's criticisms are deeply rooted in the behavioral characteristics of the studied species, homo celebricanus, which, as we sadly see in the new reality TV rage (American Idol, etc.), might as well be ANY of us, given a few million dollars and a People Magazine cover. A Massive Swelling makes for immediate, even necessary, reading and deserves a new edition with a prefatory essay that pulls the current mass hysteria/idolatry into perspective. But for all Wilson's long, feverish, and spot-on ranting against the disease of celebrity in the United States and the myriads of ways in which is distorts our culture, society, economy, she also bestows. . . praise. This strikes the reader as oddly as would delicate hands on a Cyclops. It is equally hilarious, pinning the recipient of Wilson's encomia to his or her own unique piece of corkboard for detailed scrutiny. I direct the prospective reader to the peerless portrait of King Hell Mick Jagger for a brilliant sample of Wilsonian tribute. I was tempted to dock Wilson a star for being so wholly oblivious to the many, many things other thoughtful commentators have written on fame, celebrity, and the perversions of both (they ARE different - "fame" is earned, like Julius Caesar's; "celebrity" is simply the fact of being celebrated while generally otherwise lacking merit, like the 9 American Idol losers). I couldn't bring myself to do such a thing to a book that, and writer who, so completely transported, entertained, and enlightened me - with an average belly-laugh a page. Mencken assumed room temperature half-a-hundred years ago, but the Menckenesque debunking spirit lives on in Cintra Wilson. Thank god.
Rating:
Summary: Cintra Wilson for President
Review: following is a copy of an email i just sent to a friend before surfing to amazon to read some reviews by non-famous people of cintra's book which i just sadly finished - i want more! "i have finally found a hero and her name is cintra wilson. her debut book, a massive swelling: celebrity re-examined as a grotesque crippling disease and other cultural revelations (not revolutions) is in book stores now; an absolute you must read. i want you to have as joyful a coupla days as i just did reading it, hee-hawing out loud and feeling a yummy glee of gratitude that there is someone this talented, brazen and brave to say these things so brilliantly. can't wait to see how she handles her own mega fame when it occurs despite hollywood's (i'll wager) impotent efforts to thwart her inevitable fate." i can now stand living on this planet for a while again. read cintra get happy! toss your zoloft and save a moon bear! the world ain't so bad after all! xokate
Rating:
Summary: a massive swelling talent
Review: For those who have never had the sublime pleasure of being in Cintra's company, this book will tell you why it is both your loss and gain. You see, Cintra has a viperish streak and while it is amusing to hear empty-headed celebrities scream as her venom is injected, there is the distinct possibility that you are next. That being said, the poor unfortunates who are tossed on the Bar-B-Que of Criticism are probably wishing they'd stayed nobodies. You would think that there was nothing left to be said about Michael Jackson and you would be wrong... so wrong. Lest you think that this is just another papyrus cat-fight, there are moments of keen insight into the world of gymnastics and ice sports and the ruin they wreak on young women and the vicious Fame Vampires that are their keepers. Fame, Drugs, Sex and a Style that leaves Hunter Thompson and Dennis Miller weeping and rending their garments makes this book a smart, zippy little girl who will grow up to kill all who cross her.
Rating:
Summary: not without compassion
Review: I enjoyed the book a lot. Like many readers, I am glad she's out there, wittly drawing attention to a social pathology (celebrity worship) that's so endemic that nearly no one notices or questions it. But what I really want to add to the commentary is how suprised I was to find her, at heart, really very compassionate. Even as she skewers celebrities, and their worshipful fans and wannabes, she seems finally to be deeply concerned for the corrosive effects celebrity culture has on them, and on nearly everyone. For example, despite all the witty deconstruction, she obviously feels really, really sorry for Michael Jackson, his lost youth, and his tragic attempts to reclaim it. True contempt is fairly rare in her book, and seems more reserved for talentless hacks and holders of purse-strings. And even then, I don't think she really thinks of them as happy, fulfilled, or enviable. Between the lines of acid-tongued prose: concern the the happiness and spiritual well-being of all involved.
Rating: 
Summary: All sorts of dropplings.
Review: I give the book three out of five stars because of the easy reading, not for the quality of the material. Although Wilson does prove to be a gutsy gal the content was quite disappointing. So much name dropping and not very many [deep] cultural observations. Most of the observations were just stating the obvious.
I would recommend this to a teenage girl with an eating disorder.
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