I am assuming that the reader of the review can read the description of the book, so I won't spend too much time on that. The main subjects of the book are four: Lisa Kowak, the astronaut famous for her confrontation with a romantic rival; Sol Wachtler, former Chief Justice of the New York State Court of Appeals who harassed a former lover; Linda Tripp who manipulated Monica Lewinsky and revealed her affair; and James Frey, fantasist memoir writer.

I don't think this quite deserves blurber Jacob Weisberg's description as cultural criticism of the highest order, but with one cavil, I enjoyed the book and found it thought-provoking. Reading about the self-destruction of most of the people cited herein, I couldn't help thinking about my own self-destructive and foolish impulses, one's inability to see oneself as others see us, and the fragility of self-insight. The scandals are explored in some detail, which is much more satisfying that reading about bits and pieces, especially since some of these unfolded over a fairly lengthy period of time. The information is also sourced, which raises the reliability above the scandal magazines, or someone just trying to throw together a quickie book that sells. Kipnis makes some interesting points along the way, she is witty, insightful, and sometimes compassionate. I personally love this sort of tragi-comedy, which is not going to be to everyone's taste. Someone who enjoys it might also like Jennifer Wright's It Ended Badly : Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History.

Criticism tends to get longer than praise, so I don't want the following to detract too much from my praise of the book. I thought Kipnis got a bit off-track with her section on James Frey and Oprah Winfrey. Let me say that I have a bit of a soft spot for Winfrey since I remember her from when she was on WJZ, so I've always been happy that she did well. I wouldn't consider myself to be a fan, since I've seen her show perhaps three times and we don't exactly share a world-view. I tend to assume that if Oprah recommends a book, I am NOT going to enjoy it, though I admire her for promoting reading. Hence I never read James Frey's so-called memoir until it became a scandal and I wondered what the shouting was about. And if I had read it, I wouldn't have understood what was so redemptive about an addicted obnoxious jerk becoming, at least briefly and quite possibly temporarily, a clean obnoxious jerk.

In this section of the book, Kipnis mostly abandons her stance as observer to become an advocate: "I may be the only American who felt bad for him ..." Well, no, as comments on The Smoking Gun and Amazon show, but the "everybody's doing it" schtick that runs through the chapter is a feeble justification. I don't think that the use of literary techniques in writing it is a sufficient tipoff either. I will accept that even conversations in quotes are reconstructions, but the author is walking a fine line and needs to be careful about putting words in other people's mouths. If something is billed as a memoir, I will be suspicious that there are may be self-serving omissions, but I don't accept outright lies. After reading it, and reading about it, I am inclined to think that it isn't 95% true as Frey claims, but more like 5% true. If he got away with behaving anything like he claims at the rehab center, it can't be a well-run place, not to mention all the lies that The Smoking Gun found.

Other people write "memoirs," but admit that they have novelized the material, and I don't have a problem with that if they have a disclaimer. Jacob Tomsky's (Thomas Jacobs's) Heads in Beds : a Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-called Hospitality includes the disclaimer:

"To protect the guilty and the innocent alike, I have deconstructed all hotels and rebuilt them into personal properties, changed all names, and shredded all personalities and reattached them to shreds from other personalities, creating a book of amalgams that, working together, establish, essentially a world of truth. I mean, damn, I even change me own name."

I feel like I learned a lot more about the hotel business from Tomsky, than I learned about anything from Frey.

Kipnis's reluctance to hold Frey responsible for his deceptions gives me pause about her own work, although it least she has some documentation, and it sure makes me wonder about Nan Talese's operation. It brings up a point that I don't think Kipnis considers in her work: sure, you can do what you want and break the rules, but at your own risk. If you decide that you don't take into consideration what other people think, don't be surprised if they decide that they don't think well of you.

To counter the criticism of Frey, Kipnis presents Oprah as another "self-mythologizer," but I think it misfires. Winfrey, as far as I know doesn't present actual lies about herself, and if Kipnis knows any different, she doesn't say so. She is funny when she describes Oprah, in her second encounter with Frey on her show, as a wrathful demi-goddess, but her discussion of Oprah's weight issues really doesn't work as a counterpart to Frey's fictitious memoir. That isn't a real scandal, although the scandal rags that claim that Jennifer Anniston has been pregnant multiple times or that George W. Bush was going to leave his wife for Condoleezza Rice may try to make it one. Even if one disapproves of Oprah's talk show, indiscreet confessions aren't the same as lying.

I thought the whole approach is represented by Kipnis's discussion of Oprah's first name, which was supposed to be Orpah. She has a footnote telling us that Orpah was an obscure Old Testament character, sister of Ruth, daughter-in-law to Naomi, mother to Goliath, promiscuous woman, etc. What sort of parents would saddle their child with such a name? What were they thinking? she asks. Wait a minute, I thought. I remember the Ruth and Naomi part, but I certainly couldn't remember the rest of the wild tale. That's because it's not in the Bible, it's in rabbinic literature, which I doubt Oprah's parents were familiar with, so that whole analysis is silly.

As I said, the criticism got a bit long, but I really did enjoy the book as a whole, and it is interesting to think about the points Kipnis made, so I recommend it to readers who find such things interesting. ( )

Written by a professor at Northwestern University, this is a look at the bad behavior and life-altering decisions that people make on a level that garners them national attention.
Kipnis covers many national scandals that were recent as of the book's 2010 printing, but primarily focuses on four cases as a jumping-off point to discuss possible reasons why the person behaved as they did and why society reacted as it did. Though this is a book of pop psychology masking as sociology (Kipnis has no medical degree), the author has a way of getting to the root of why the public turns on certain people so viciously. ( )

Fun, topical. I was too busy to get into it at present, but I'll return, if for no other reason than a review of the silly things famous people did within my lifetime to screw themselves up. ( )

A creative, contemporary review of scandals from the US news. Destined to become outdated quickly (as in a year later, or less) but fun to read if you have an interest in American tabloids. Kipnis is witty and sharp and easy to read, while her material may seem already out of date. I liked her style, even while the general feel seemed like an E-TV entertainment faux news special or a Lifestyle survey of sad quasi-famous ladies' stories. ( )

Reading Kipnis' detailed analysis of four fairly recent scandals in American society made me feel like an intellectual and fed my longing for squeamishly juicy details. ( )