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How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
by: Toby Young

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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 817
EAN: 9780349114859
ISBN: 0349114854
Label: Abacus
Manufacturer: Abacus
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: July 18, 2002
Publisher: Abacus
Studio: Abacus
Sales Rank: 5585

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Editorial Review:

Amazon.co.uk Review:
In How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Toby Young--columnist and former co-editor (with Julie Burchill and Cosmo Landesman) of The Modern Review--portrays himself as a man pulled to the New York media set by twin desires: to trade one-liners with modern day Dorothy Parkers and Robert Benchleys over very dry martinis, and to drink Cristal from a supermodel's cleavage in the back of a limo. In the event, neither is fulfilled and desire shows itself up to be the snake that eats its own tail--endless and ultimately encircling a big fat zero.

How to Lose... is Young's own telling of his disastrous five-year career in New York journalism, initiated when he is offered a job at Vanity Fair, Conde Nast's flagship star-fest. Young may have been hired for his snappy prose, but his real genius turns out to be antagonising the rich and famous. He is the British bulldog in the Armani-clad china shop of the politically correct glossy posse. He hires a strip-o-gram on bring-your-daughter-to-work day, commits the cardinal sin of asking celebs about their religion and sexual orientation, gets blasted on coke while trying to do a photo shoot and spends less time pulling up his chair to the modern day equivalent of the Algonquin table than trying to blag his way past "clipboard Nazis" barring his way into showbiz parties. Oh, and he gets sued by Tina Brown and Harold Evans. This is the place, he soon discovers, where greatness is measured not in your prose stylings, but how far up the guest list you are for Vanity Fair's Oscar party. But two things raise this particular loser's story above the crowd. First is his spot-on outsider's inside observations on phenomena such as the rigidly Austen-ite New York dating scene. Second, he has the columnist's knack of connecting everyday experience to social politics in order to grind both personal and political axes. In the adoration of the celebrity aristocracy by the masses, he sees the realisation of de Toqueville's warning of "the tyranny of the majority" and witnesses, for those lower down the food chain, the corruption of the "be all that you can be" meritocracy America promises. If these are soft targets, then the hilariously toe-curling experiences that lead him to take aim are well worth the price of a cocktail. --Fiona Buckland

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Don't believe the anti-hype
I came to this memoir as I was interested to see how they had turned it into the film (which I saw first and thought was crucifyingly dull, although Simon Pegg is good). From all the press surrounding the film you could get the wrong idea about the book. If you believed everything you read then you'd be of the opinion that once you'd finished this book you would hate Toby Young to the point where if you met him you'd kill him, and that simply isn't the case. If anyone comes out of this looking bad it's the monstrous denizens of New York. There's no doubt that Young is the architect of his own downfall but, strangely, Fleet Street comes out of this looking a surprisingly commendable place, with a great sense of humour and a healthy dose of cynicism. ... Read More:

Rating:

- Appealled to my cynical side
I found this to be an interesting insight into the world of the NY glossies - a world of which I have no experience.
The attitude of the author to his surroundings strongly appealled to my generally rather cynical nature towards both Americans and the media.
I think that Toby Young has a great sense of humour and I'm glad that he has made some money doing something.
All that said, I found that the book seemed to take too long to read and, at times, felt that the name dropping became a bit too much as the author seemed to assume a level of previous knowledge in the reader - which I didn't have!
Where the book was written in the "tongue in cheek" manner it was fabulous - when his tongue fell out it became a bit more of a slog!

Rating:

- Entertaining read, very funny in places
This is a pretty easy to read book that tells the story of a London freelance journalist's five years trying to make a name for himself in New York in the mid-1990s. It's certainly an entertaining read and shows the shallow unreal world of celebrities and their hangers-on for what it undoubtedly is.

A friend lent me this book to read and told me that it was hilarious. I agree that there were parts of it that were very amusing but not all of it fitted the description she gave it. That said Mr Young's perceptions are often very witty and accurate; my favourite one was near the end of the book when he describes how married men view the world of bachelors with rose-tinted glasses thinking that bachelors live in some sort of big house in ... Read More:

Rating:

- Thoroughly 'Laddish' but with redeeming features!
Toby Young had moved from London to New York to work on Vanity Fair magazine and mix with the 'Beautiful People.' How to Lose Friends and Alienate People consists of a series of embarrassing events, usually involving Young's ridiculous and increasingly desperate attempts to get into the VIP area of parties and being slung back out again!

This might not sound too promising, but Young can be really funny and comes across as pretty candid, which is why he gets away with it. Juxtaposed are incidents such as employing a stripper to strip at Vanity Fair on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day with painful memories about the death of his mother.

I'm not usually a fan of laddish lit, but this really made me laugh. The anecdotes about Anna ... Read More:

Rating:

- If you are familiar with Toby Young..
...and you don't like him, this will probably heighten that feeling.

A 342 paged catalogue of ancedotal stories which would be best saved for a dinner party in Chelsea, Tobs.

He comes across as smug, arrogant, insincerely dense and impossibly shallow.

I dislike his 'journalism' immensely and I wanted to see if I misjudged him. I did not.

Books : How to Lose Friends and Alienate People