Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity
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In explaining the power of celebrity in modern life, Richard Schickel ranges through every realm of our culture--film, theatre, television, literature, art, the media, pop music, politics--for examples of how celebrity shapes our world and bends our minds.
Customer Review: great celebrico-politico-culturo analysis
Schickel's book is a good read. He may be long on film criticism at times, but he makes up for those irrelevant tangents into the recesses of Marlon Brando's film career by imbuing the work with clever insights into the beliefs and attitudes that shape how Americans think about living life under the gaze.
And Shickel is right about at least one thing: great reasoning isn't attended by a flash of popularity or excessive revenue--the hallmarks of modern celebrity. Only in places older than America--places where a premium has historically been placed on the life of the mind--do we encounter figures who have posthumously transcended popularity in public consciousness. Giants of contemplative rationality--Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Martin Luther, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Newton, Darwin, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Freud, and many others--have all attained a once-and-for-all celebrity to which no current celebrity, American or otherwise, can approximate.
If it ever occurs to you to wonder, "Why is America so dumb?", Shickel wants you to realize that the answer probably has something to do with how our culture esteems the wrong kind of people for the wrong kinds of things. In the long run, when the sun burns out and the universe shrinks back down to a pinhead, wouldn't you rather have been Einstein than Madonna??
Customer Review: Fine Book
An incisive and clearly delineated look at celebrity, especially astute in dealing with the fading of celebrity. In a time of omni-celebrities the book becomes pertinent in being able to understand such impossible figures as one called Paris Hilton, how a woman of no talent can propell herself into the ranks of most recognizable "celebrities." Schickel's book is, also, a pleasure to read
