Books : How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

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.

With all the bluster over Young's "negative charisma", the fact that this is an interesting and no doubt accurate representation of working at Vanity Fair in the 1990s gets lost. Read this for some pretty robust portraits of some of the city's movers-and-shakers of that era if nothing else.

The book does tend to unravel a little bit towards the end, much as Young's own life does. All the diverting stuff falls by the wayside and we get a lot of introspection about his family which is interesting but doesn't really fit with the tone of the book.

There is no doubt that Young is an intelligent, well-educated man (but do you have to keep telling us you got a First in PPE at Brasenose College, Oxford??), there is plenty of informed discussion on the American condition that borders on the academic. However, he should have kept a little bit more to the comic path and stayed away from the redemptive ending that, ironically, is so beloved of our trans-Atlantic brethren.

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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!

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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 Beverley Hills surrounded by a harem of supermodels!.....from my experience of bachelorhood this is (unfortunately) certainly not the case!

The book moves from being laddish to being quite serious in tone and towards the end it is even (relatively!) moving. It mixes high-brow and low-brow subjects quite easily and has some very informative passages, for example where Mr Young explains why Britain is in fact a much fairer and more equal society than America.

On the minus side, I think some of the characters in the literary to whom the book refers are a bit obscure and would be unknown to most people who did not move in literary circles and consequently those passages of the book can be a bit tedious. Also I think that the book will date as it mentions current celebrities quite a bit so when they are no longer in the public eye I wonder if it will still hold its appeal to the same extent as it does today.

Overall though, well worth reading for an entertaining and (at the end) touching story.

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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 Wintour, Editor of Vogue, are so ridiculous as to be unbelievable (so I really hope they're true!!)

Recommended

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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.