Books : How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Rating: - The title is the best thing about this book.
The title of this book is quite clever I thought, and is the reason I bought the book. The book is not quite as good, but is still highly enjoyable, although not quite what I expected. From the title, I expected a negative, bitter, cynical book, but it's fairly upbeat. A little self-indulgent and drags on a bit, but worth a read.

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Rating: - Funky Tome Boasts a Plethora of Wit.
Wanna chortle? Here's a humor honcho with no paucity of weird chuckles. But insist that freebie-garnering freeloaders cough up for their *own* copy. [I'm not mad, she quipped - just quoting from the Annoying, Alarming and Appalling Graydon Carter's list of words banned from Vanity Fair].

Lovely book, this, if only because I now know why people hiss "Your basic nightmare" behind my back. And I thought they were being so *horrid*.

I'm not 100% convinced that Toby Young really knew what was going on around him during his pride-swallowing siege in the Condé Nast cathouse. That *might* be what makes this such a must-read study of self-inventees. And who better as Exhibit A under the Young laser gaze than the dapper but thin-skinned Graydon C? Ex-Air Force brat who taught himself the Power Strut and never looked back. Go-o-o Grayders. Toby nails him bang to rights - affected regular guy down-to-earthiness before whom none can be too abject a brown noser. It's just too funny and I can't wait for 'How to Lose Even *More* Friends' to come out. Meanwhile, I myself am being hounded by a beautiful (but singularly stupid) man who absolutely defines Naked Obeisance to Power (brilliantly ridiculed here). BBSS Man reads nothing but his Ferrari and Cessna manuals so this'll be an unexpected literary boot in the goolies to deliver the message once and for all. Valentine's Day cadeau! Perfect - as is everything else about this agile memoir.

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Rating: - Witt-meister whups Manhattan glosserati ass
Anyone who doesn't like this perceptive and witty book, join Tina and Harry and all the other insecure inverse Byrons in the 'Anxious Evans' corner. Toby Young may not have bedded those Manhattan super models he yearned after, or eluded the 'clipboard Nazis' to primp and preen at those faux-élite Vanity Fair parties, but he got a damn'd good book out of it and wreaked hilarious mischief on that whole Eros-lite New York scene. His prose is gritty and clear and his self-deprecating humour is spot on for the humble tale he tells.

It'll baffle the Americans, of course. I can just hear them ranting on about how he's a total loser, lacks any sorta cool - or just plain doesn't get it. All of which TY freely owns up to (not to mention courageously recalls in accounts of Herculean Haden-Guest-style binges).

For the excellent footnotes alone, "Lose" is a gem, but the killer payoff is ... the dude gets the girl. Against all odds - and wholly undeserving of the Toby of yore - the bounder actually woos and wins the divine Caroline. It's nail-biting stuff reading his every attempt to sabotage lasting happiness, and a measure of the non-pareil lady that she sees thru his fey looniness of the time. God bless them both. For the rest of us, stuck with pondering Love, family, 'elevator etiquette', and the erosion of freedom - buy this book.

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Rating: - Not worth the money
I fail to see how Toby Young could be described as a "high-flying British journalist" in the editorial review. The book is not funny, and reads like the ravings of an over-grown 17 year-old trying to justify his juvenile ways. I consider buying this book as a waste of money.

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Rating: - Disingenuous and pretentious, but a good read nonetheless...
Although Young is keen to bracket his picaresque memoir as loser lit (a male, balding Bridget Jones), he is ofcourse not a failure by any ordinary criteria. He has a stunning girlfriend and graduated from Oxford with a first, as he reminds us. Even at his lowest ebb he was writing for the 'American equivalent of Loaded'; a prospect some of my male friends (who embody the spirit of loserism to a much fuller extent) would accept with alacrity. Indeed, the book could not have been written from a less exalted social location; 'self-deprecation' implies that there is something to deprecate.

And the kind of self-deprecation in which Young trades is particularly buoyant and readable; sprightly vignettes plot his southward trajectory (the funniest of which concerns Diana Ross, a public phone and a 'whatchamacallit'), there is a running joke involving his friend Alex de Silva (whose career path is apparently inversely proportionate to his own), and the whole thing slides along on some insightful social glosses.

The book is at its least successful (and Young at his most genuinely off-putting) when too much of a production is made of the latter; de Tocqueville and Freud crop up with ostentatious regularity, and his disasterous decision to saddle the text with quasi-scholarly impedimanta (there are even footnotes) is as misguided as any documented within the narrative itself.