How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
by Toby Young

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Book Reviews of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

Book Review: Plausible, cunning, literary: Brit humor at its driest
Summary: 5 Stars

This is the witty memoir to jolt us out of Alertness Fatigue and all the government-induced 9/11 jitters essential to keep us focused on Saddam-bashing.

Here's this self-effacing Brit arriving in the Big Bagel to take Condé Nast by storm and canoodle with the celebs - and he totally flubs it on every front. Any self-respecting dude would pack up and go sell matches down Nacogdoches way, but not them blue-bloods. The Honorable Toby Young pauses only to fire up the word processor and - shazam - he's got a hot book out of it that also wreaks hilarious revenge on those who rejoiced in his downfall in the first place.

The book amuses wherever it falls open: the list of words banned by the Canuck airforce brat editor of 'Vanity Fair', Graydon 'Powerstrut' Carter; Young's brilliant idea for an profile of ubiquitous partygoer Jay McInerney as a notorious recluse à la Salinger or Pynchon; belletrist GW's winning way with the "clipboard Nazis" at the Bowery Bar; the major babes in the C-Nast elevators, sizing each other up "with the cold-blooded hostility of professional athletes", pouncing on any perceived fashion disaster with disapproving comments ranging "from the fairly mild - 'Aggressive choice!' - to the outright rude - 'It ain't working, honey.'"

"Alienate" abounds in such gems, delivered with a sure pen and sharpest ear and with that killer diffidence that makes your upper class Oxford type so dangerous to turn one's back on.

Nor is it just a catalog of TY's pathetic inability to bed any of this great country's Grade 1 beauties. Just when you think he's clowning, out comes Tocqueville from the bottom of the
deck and it's spot-on stuff - like that famed observation that "I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America." Ouch, but also let him try mouthing that around the 'Lonely Pines Grill & Bar' ...

Don't take my word for it: check out "HLFAP" at the library or your local brick n mortar and see if you can stop browsing or grinning. Nice one, Mister Young.

Summary of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

Journalists Books

• Books > Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics
• Regional U.S. > Mid Atlantic