A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations
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Whether you lust after it, loathe it, or feign apathy toward it, fame is in your face. Cintra Wilson gets to the heart of our humiliating fascination with celebrity and all its preposterous trappings in these hilarious, whip-smart, and subversive essays. Often radical and always a scream, Wilson takes on every sacred cow, toppling icons as diverse as Barbra Streisand, Ike Turner, Michael Jackson, and-for obvious reasons-Bruce Willis. She exposes events like the Oscars and even athletic jamborees as having grown a "tumescent aura of Otherness." Wilson's scathing and irresistible dissections of Las Vegas as "the Death Star of Entertainment," and Los Angeles as "a giant peach of a dream crawling with centipedes" pulse with her enlightened rejection of all things false and vain and egotistical. Written with her trademark zeal and intelligence, A Massive Swelling is the antidote for the fame virus that infects us all.
Customer Review: The Definitive Snarky Pop-Culture Bible
If you have a love-hate relationship with our celebrity culture, this is a book you must read. Both grudgingly admiring and sharply critical, this book discusses our fascination with celebrities in an always hilarious and sometimes even enlightening way. Topics discussed include Michael Jackson, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, the allure of boybands, plastic surgery, eating disorders, drugs, Tina Turner, rock n roll, and Bruce Willis. Every chapter is funny and insightful. And come on, doesn't any book with the subtitle: "Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease" deserve your $10?
Highly recommended.
Customer Review: Spot-On Commentary on our celebrity-obsessed culture
This is a book that sorely needed to be written. It may be several years old, but it was new to me.
With a piercing wit and a sharp tongue, Cintra Wilson cuts down to size some of Hollywood's biggest celebrities. The result is both funny and sad at the same time. Funny, because it's always entertaining to see the rich and famous make fools of themselves in the pursuit of even greater fame, power and money.
And sad, because it's pathetic to see the extent to which some of these people are willing to debase themselves in order to maintain their status once they become rich and famous, especially those that have questionable talent to begin with. Even sadder is the fact that masses of people all over the world idolize them.
With their self-indulgent behavior often disguised from the public or cloaked under a veil of piousness (i.e, Ethan Hawke, Tom Hanks) Wilson reveals how some of liberal Hollywood's biggest names are about as morally bankrupt as the staunchest right-wing conservative.
What makes this book carry even more weight with me is the fact that it was written by someone who describes herself as being "about as liberal as they come". But Wilson's commentary is far and above the type of one-sided and one-dimensional whining about Hollywood and the "media elite" one gets from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill Bennett, and other purveyors of right-wing bile.
[Aside: I once saw Bill Bennett walking in downtown Washington, DC; the man's belly was the size of three pregnant women combined. I mean, it was just enormous; someone needs to tell him that gluttony is no virtue (and neither is gambling, for that matter...he he :-)].
But back to my review...
In a few cases, Wilson details specific incidents of outrageous or attention-seeking behavior on the part of certain celebrities, identifying the person by name - Barbara Streisand, Keeanu Reeves, Cher, Courtney Love, Celine Dion, Michael Jackson (Dion and Jackson receive a particularly delicious skewering).
But in other instances, she refers to "a celebrity who shall remain nameless". For example, I would love to know the name of the ogre who for no reason at all drew a gun and shot someone's watch. I wondered why some of them were named while others not. (Threat of lawsuits would be my guess).
Predictably, some of the celebrities' bad behavior involves sexual improprieties. In fact, the book is filled with accounts of people who have literally prostituted themselves for fame.
My one (and very slight) criticism of "A Massive Swelling" has to do with Wilson's writing style, which can only be described as idiosyncratic. She has a tendency to write in run-on sentences, which require several re-readings to understand. However, this is a small complaint and it in no way diminishes the value--and timeliness--of this hilariously entertaining book.
