Category Archives: Culture

From Publishers Weekly
Many little girls dream of becoming a princess and finding their Prince Charming. Fine was no different and, at the age of six, traced the Windsor family tree to Peter Phillips, an English royal of her same age, and announced she would marry him. Unlike other girls, however, this dream did not fade away with adolescence. With a story line akin to a chick lit novel, her memoir follows her single-minded path to become suitable wife material for a prince, to move to England and to be swept away in a royal romance. Born to hippie parents in rural Colorado, Fine comes of age feeling out of place and escapes to the East Coast for college and then to graduate school in London. There she ingratiates herself into English social circles, eventually rubbing shoulders with Princess Anne, the Duchess of York and others. Amid her lessons in British society and the universal woes of dating, she also gains the important knowledge that the strength of one’s conviction can be the strongest predictor of one’s fate. Provided the reader doesn’t grimace to see her determination, intelligence and grace used to pursue a man she’s never met, Fine’s is a charming and humorous story.

Jerramy Fine wants to be a princess. At age 6, she announces that she is going to meet and marry the Queen of England’s grandson and even as she gets older, not once does she change her mind! But growing up with hippie parents in the middle of a rodeo-loving farm town makes finding her prince a bigger challenge than Jerramy ever bargained for. How can she prepare to lead a royal life when she’s surrounded by nothing but tofu and tractors?

Jerramy spends her lonely childhood writing love-letters to Buckingham Palace, and years later, when her sense of destiny finally brings her to London, she dives head first into a whirlwind of champagne-fuelled society parties in search of her royal soul mate. She drinks way too many martinis and kisses far too many Hugh Grant look-a-likes, but life in England is not the Disney fairytale she hoped it would be. Her flatmates are lunatics, London is expensive, and British boys (despite their cute accents) are infuriating. Sure, she’s rubbing shoulders with Princess Anne, Earl Spencer and the Duchess of York – but will she ever meet her prince?

The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life by Ivanka Trump

From a rising star in the business world, The Trump Card is a book for young women on how to achieve success in any field. Ivanka Marie Trump is a businesswoman, a one-time fashion model, and the daughter of Ivana and Donald Trump. Ivanka joined The Trump Organization in 2005 as a member of the development team and is currently Vice President of Real Estate Development and Acquisitions. She actively participates in all aspects of real estate development from deal evaluation, analysis and pre-development planning to construction, marketing, operations, sales and leasing.

Everyone Worth Knowing by Lauren Weisberger

From Publishers WeeklyLily Rabe throws herself enthusiastically into her narration; she sounds like she’s having a ball, and listeners will, too. Rabe especially has fun with over-the-top Brazilian sexpot Adriana, making melodramatic pronouncements and calling everyone querida in a sexy, throaty exotic accent. She’s also great as Emmy, the marriage-and-family–obsessed member of the trio: Rabe’s sobbing, outraged delivery of Emmy’s rant about her boyfriend dumping her for his personal trainer is simultaneously touching and hilarious. Leigh is the straight man of the group, but Rabe’s performance conveys her doubts about her engagement realistically and sympathetically. This fun audio brings out the best in the novel.

One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell

From Publishers Weekly: Sex in the City goes middle-aged, mordant and slapstick in Bushnell’s chronicle of writers, actors and Wall Street whizzes clashing at One Fifth Avenue, a Greenwich Village art deco jewel crammed with regal rich, tarty upstarts and misguided lovers. When a Queen of Society dies, a vicious scramble for her penthouse apartment ensues, and it’s attorney Annalisa and her hedge-funder husband, Paul Rice, who land the palatial pad, roiling the building’s rivalries. There’s Billy Litchfield, an art dealer who slobbers over the wealthy; strivers Mindy and James Gooch, and their tech-savvy 13-year-old Sam, the most hilariously bitter (and strangely successful) family in the building; gossip columnist Enid Merle and her screenwriter nephew, Philip Oakland, who struggle to uphold traditions and their souls; actress Schiffer Diamond, who lands a hit TV series, and her old love; and Lola Fabrikant, a cunning Atlanta gold digger whose greatest ambition is to become Carrie Bradshaw. Here are bloggers and bullies, misfits and misanthropes, dear hearts and black-hearts, dogfights and catty squalls spun into a darkly humorous chick-lit saga.

Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis

Amazon.com Review
Glamorama is a satirical mass-murder opus more ambitious than Bret Easton Ellis’s 1990 American Psycho. It starts as a spritz-of-consciousness romp about kid-club entrepreneur Victor Ward, “the It boy of the moment,” an actor-model up for Flatliners II. Ellis has perfect pitch for glam-speak, and he gives nightlife the fizz, pace, and shimmer it lacks in drab reality. Anyone could cite the right celeb names and tunes, but like a rock-polishing machine, his prose gives literary sheen to fame-chasing air-kissers. He’s coldly funny: when Victor’s girl tries to argue him out of a breakup, she angrily snorts six bumps of coke, stops, mutters, “Wrong vial,” snorts four corrective doses from whatever she has in her other fist, then objects to a rival at the party wearing the same dress she’s wearing. You had to be there; Ellis makes you feel you are. But such satire is a very smart bomb targeting a very large barn. Models’ status anxiety doesn’t merit Ellis’s Tom Wolfe-esque expertise. Glamorama gets better when Victor gets drafted into a mysterious group of model-terrorists who bomb 747s and the Ritz in Paris, wearing Kevlar-lined Armani suits. Oh, they still behave like shallow snobs, pronouncing “cool” as if it had 12 o’s. But now when somebody swills Cristal, it’s apt to be poisoned, to horrific effect, which Ellis expertly, affectlessly describes. His enfant-terrible debut, Less Than Zero, aped Joan Didion. Now Ellis has grown into a lesser Don DeLillo–and that’s high praise. –Tim Appelo –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
The evil twin of fellow brat-packer Jay McInerney’s Model Behavior, Ellis’s (The Informers) bad trip through glitterary New York has everything his fans (and critics) have come to expect: graphic sex, designer drugs, rock ‘n’ roll allusions, splatterpunk violence and characters as deep as 8″x10″ glossies. Protagonist Victor Ward, a “model-slash-loser,” is opening his own trendy Manhattan club while cheating on his supermodel girlfriend and back-stabbing his partner. After some adventures in clubland, the plot takes a turn for the paranoid. Victor is recruited by a mysterious figure, F. Fred Palakon, to track down a former girlfriend gone missing in London. There he becomes unwillingly drawn into a terrorist group?run, like so much else in the novel, by a supermodel?that bombs fashionable hangouts, hotels and jetliners. Throughout, Ellis clutters his hallmark proper-noun realism with excessive name-dropping and strung-out plotting. The satirist in Ellis seems to want to indict celebrity-obsessed, materialistic and superficial contemporary culture. With this novel he, perhaps unwittingly but certainly ironically, provides Exhibit A. 100,000 first printing.