Are You Nuts When You Hate A Book Others Love?

“Am I crazy? The critics raved about this book, but I hated it.” I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard a comment like that.

Are we sometimes gaslit by reviews? Why does it happen? How can you avoid getting burned by book, movie, or TV reviews?

Let me reassure you: You’re not crazy. We all have unique tastes, preferences, and life experiences, and yours may simply differ from those of the reviewers you’ve read.

But critics do sometimes overpraise books for reasons that have nothing to do with dishonesty or trying to gaslight you. I explain what they are at @Medium and offer five ways to avoid getting burned by the reviews when you’re trying to decide what to read or see. My tips include a list of weasel words that may tell you that a critic is pulling punches.

Too Many TV Ads Stereotype People Over 50

Something is missing from all those commercials for the new fall smartphones–gray hair.

You’d never know from the TV ads that most Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 own a smartphone. Older Americans appear in only 15 percent of media images shown by popular brands or groups. And just 5 percent of the images show over-50s using technology, an AARP study found.

That’s far from the only injustice the TV advertisers do to Americans of a certain age.

Too many marketers see people over 50 as stuck in the era of Steely Dan and bell-bottoms, if not in that of the Dave Clark Five and go-go books. In her recent book In Our Prime: How Older Women Are Reinventing the Road Ahead, the media scholar Susan J. Douglas faults the many ways in which marketers stereotype boomers, older Gen-Xers, and, basically, anyone they see as “old.”

Douglas notes that advertisers roll out ageist stereotypes, in drug and other ads, in ways that especially hurt women. In commercials gray-haired men drive tractors, go kayaking, or play guitar in a rock band. Women shop, garden, or play with grandchildren.

Interested in learning more? I take on some of the most common stereotypes in my “Five Ways TV Commercials Insult People Over 50″ on Medium. Visitors to the site have been adding other stereotypes or injustices in a lively discussion in the comments section. I respond to all, so please drop by and add your own if this topic interests you. Thanks for visiting One-Minute Book Reviews.

Like ‘Seinfeld,’ ‘Madame Bovary’ Is ‘About Nothing’

Jerry Seinfeld joked that his long-running NBC sitcom was “a show about nothing.” Did Madame Bovary inspire the words that became one of the best-known catchphrases in television? Consider this passage from One-Hundred Great French Books (BlueBridge, 2010), by Lance Donaldson-Evans, a professor of romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania:

“Flaubert once described Madame Bovary as a work ‘about nothing,’ a curious description for a book in which a great deal happens. What he really meant was that he had deliberately selected a trite subject in order to show that even banality could be redeemed by art. “

Tori Spelling’s Hollywood Memoir, ‘Mommywood’ – ‘Dean and I Have Sex Three to Four Times a Week!’

Guests brought gay-themed gifts to a baby shower for her son, Liam

Mommywood. By Tori Spelling with Hilary Liftin. Simon Spotlight, 243 pp., $25.

By Janice Harayda

Tori Spelling once wore a Marie Antoinette Halloween costume custom-made by Nolan Miller, the designer for Dynasty and other televisions show produced by her father, Aaron Spelling. In a sense, the media have never allowed her to take it off.

Spelling has been guillotined by tabloids and others for a tumbrel of offenses — her nose job, her feud with her mother, her breast-augmentation surgery, her acting on Beverly Hills, 90210, her appearances with her husband on the reality show Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood. “I’m cocktail party joke material,” she says in Mommywood, the follow-up to her bestselling memoir, sTORI telling.

Spelling’s new book describes her efforts to give her two young children what she calls a more “normal” childhood than she had. An example of normal in Hollywood occurred when she became pregnant with her son, Liam, and her gay friends worried that her firstborn would be “too straight to hang out” with them.

“In hopes of being an early influence, lots of my friend gave me gay-themed gifts at my baby shower,” Spelling writes. “A pink onesie saying ‘My boyfriend’s out of town for the weekend.’ A rock T-shirt saying ‘Queen’ (as in the band).”

Another example of “normal”: Spelling worked her pregnancy into her reality show and took her son on an international media tour when he was two months old. Some of the stories that resulted are perversely entertaining. But Mommywood as a whole is a self-indulgent font of evidence of Spelling’s insecurities and questionable judgment. And that especially applies to its criticisms of her mother, Candy Spelling, who has given different versions of some of the events in this book to the media. If you want your children to grow up unwarped by Hollywood, will it help to write a book keeps taking swipes at their grandmother?

Best line: “I grew up in a house with a driveway that was so long I can’t remember ever walking to the bottom of it.”

Worst line: No. 1: “Now I have two children of my own and I want them to have a normal childhood.” This comes from someone who took her son on a media tour when he was two months old. No. 2: “Dean and I were sitting around a table with some producers from our show. We were talking about sex after babies, and one of the other married men at the table said, ‘What sex life after kids?’ Dean and I have sex three to four times a week!” No. 3: Spelling writes of the day her son had an accident at a pool: “Either you know this already or it’s too much information, but swim diapers aren’t rigged quite the same way as normal diapers are. Swim diapers have a tough job. They have to keep in whatever comes out. Without them, babies would put the ‘poo’ in ‘pool.’ So they don’t have convenient Velcro openings. You can’t just untape, wipe, and be done with it. Instead they’re like little pants. The load is kind of trapped in there. Good news for the other swimmers, but once I had Liam in my arms, I had no idea how to get that swim diaper off while adequately containing its contents. That is to say, I feared the poop. …
“I laid Liam down on his towel. I pulled off the swim diaper. Again, either you know this already or it’s too much information, but when poo is exposed to that environment (pool water, a sopping swim diaper, a hyper child – the trifecta), it loses its structural integrity. There was no … cohesion. Just crumbles of poo everywhere. A horror show.
“I went in for the kill, but a few swipes later I was out of wipes and still facing an insurmountable mess. I swear, there was actually more there than when I started.”

Published: February 2009

© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
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Dr. Phil Admits, ‘I May Not Be the Sharpest Pencil in the Box’ in ‘Love Smart: Find the One You Want — Fix the One You Got’

Love Smart was one of 10 finalists in the 2007 Delete Key Awards contest, which recognizes the year’s worst writing in books. Dr. Phil lost to Danielle Steel (grand-prize winner), Mitch Albom (first runner-up) and Claire Messud (second runner-up). This review appeared in February 2007.

Love Smart: Find the One You Want – Fix the One You Got. By Dr. Phil McGraw. Free Press, 283 pp., $15, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

Help me, please, with the math in Dr. Phil McGraw’s relationship guide for women. First the talk-show host says that to attract a worthy man, you need to feel confident enough to take your “fair share of time in most conversations – 50 percent in a twosome, 33 percent in a threesome, and so forth.” Then he says that when you’re dating: “Self-disclosure should be used only 25 percent of the time. The other 75 percent should be listening.” So which is it? Should you be talking 50 percent of the time or 25 percent?

I have no idea, because McGraw doesn’t say how he got those figures, and his book is full of mush like this. Love Smart is one of those self-help guides that has LOTS OF LARGE TYPE. It also has exclamation points! More than two dozen in the first seven pages! That doesn’t count the one in the first paragraph of the acknowledgments! But I’ll say this for McGraw: He is equally patronizing to women and men. He reduces them both 1950s stereotypes given a 21st-century gloss with advice on Internet dating and quotes from celebrities like Dave Barry and Rita Rudner.

Much of his advice retools the kind of messages Bridget Jones got from her mother. First, stop being so picky. Of course, McGraw doesn’t use that word. He urges you to settle for “Mr. 80 Percent.” Then forget what you may have heard from other experts about how there are more differences between any one man and woman than between the sexes as a whole.

“I’ve got news for you: Men and women are different,” McGraw says. A lot of men have a “caveman” mentality that requires a “bag’em, tag’em, bring’em home” approach. This method includes more of the kind of advice your mother – or maybe grandmother – gave you. McGraw doesn’t come right out and say you should “save yourself for your husband.” But he does suggest you hold sex “in reserve” until a man has made “the ultimate commitment”: “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to McGraw that some women might not appreciate being compared to cows.

The most bizarre section of Love Smart consists of its list of the “top 31 places” to meet men. No. 1 and 2 on the list are “your church or temple” and “batting cages.” You might meet men at those batting cages. But the U.S. Congregational Life Survey found that the typical American churchgoer is a 50-year old married female. So what are the criteria here? Sheer numbers of the other sex? Or compatibility with your values? The list makes no more sense than most of the other material in Love Smart. Earlier in the book, McGraw begins an account of a disagreement with his wife by saying, “Now I may not be the sharpest pencil in the box …” Why didn’t somebody tell Oprah?

Best line: The comedian Rita Rudner says, “To attract men I wear a perfume called New Car Interior.” Love Smart also has some zingers that women have used to insult men, such as, “He has delusions of adequacy.”

Worst line: McGraw never uses one cliché when he can use three or four, as in: “Now it seems time to step up and close the deal, get ‘the fish in the boat,’ walk down the aisle, tie the knot … you want to get to the next level.”

Editor: Dominick Anfuso

Published: December 2006

To read more about the Delete Key Awards, click on the “Delete Key Awards” tag at the top of this post or the “Delete Key Awards” category at right. To read more about the creator of the awards, click on “About Janice Harayda.”

© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

2009 Delete Key Awards Finalist #1 – Denis Leary’s ‘Why We Suck’

Delete Key Awards Finalist #1 comes from Denis Leary’s Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid (Viking, 240 pp., $26.95):

The winner of the first-ever One-Minute Book Reviews visitors’ poll:
“I’ll take five Anna Nicole Smiths for every Martin Luther King.”

And the runner-up in the poll:
“The women [at the gym]? Paired off on adjacent treadmills or elliptical trainers – yak yakkety yick yak yic, yic yickety, yawbeddy jawbeddy – jic jak yick. Yicketty yacketty blah blah blah.”

Can we all agree that somebody needs to rescue the prose of the star of Rescue Me?

© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

You Be the Delete Key Awards Judge — First-Ever One-Minute Book Reviews Visitors Poll — What Is the Worst Line in Denis Leary’s ‘Why We Suck’?

Update at Sunday 9:15 p.m. Eastern Time: Right now it’s a dead heat between two of the quotes below. Although other posts will follow, the poll will remain open until 5 p.m. Wednesday. The results will appear Thursday, Feb. 26, when the 2009 Delete Key Awards shortlist is announced. Thanks for visiting One-Minute Book Reviews. Jan

On Thursday I’ll post the shortlist for the Third Annual Delete Key Awards for the year’s worst writing in books, and this year I wanted to let you choose one of the finalists. This sounded easy, because WordPress has added a polling tool called PollDaddy. And the obvious choice was to let you pick a line from Why We Suck, a collection of rants by Rescue Me star Denis Leary, because that one abounded with candidates for deletion.

But trying to get PollDaddy working was more stressful than the time I was trapped on a Manhattan subway while the police searched for a gunman on the tracks, because in that case the cops found the guy pretty quickly and the train started moving again. My attempt to get the poll working went on for days and involved a) visits to the WordPress Support Pages; b) e-mail to support@wordpress.com; and b) using the PollDaddy page on WordPress TV.

When I finally got the poll going, I saw that PollDaddy doesn’t provide enough space for the full fourth quote below which you can read here. Given all this, I’m not sure when I’ll do another survey, so if you want to tamper with the Delete Key Awards jury, this is your chance. Results of the poll will appear Thursday.

(c) 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.twitter.com/janiceharayda

Vote for Denis Leary’s Worst Line – Which One Should be a Finalist for a Delete Key Award for the Year’s Worst Writing in Books?

One or two lines usually stand out in books that are frontrunners for the Delete Key Awards for bad writing, the shortlist for which will be announced on Feb. 26. Then there’s Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid. (Viking, 240 pp., $26.95) by the comedian and Rescue Me star Denis Leary. You could practically tape pages from this one to a wall, throw darts, and come up with a winner.

Can you help to select the worst line from among the many worthies in the book? Some of the candidates appear below. (In entry No. 4, asterisks replace words likely get this post blocked by library filters.)

1 “I’ll take five Anna Nicole Smiths for every Martin Luther King.”

2 “I don’t know a living man on this planet who DOESN’T have attention deficit disorder or spends [sic] at least twelve hours of each day thinking about his penis.”

3 “The women [at the gym]? Paired off on adjacent treadmills or elliptical trainers – yak yakkety yick yak yic, yic yickety, yawbeddy jawbeddy – jic jak yick. Yicketty yacketty blah blah blah.”

4 “Which is why I walk around now just wishing I could grab every other mouthy, misbehaved, spoiled and rotten little urchin I come across in airports and restaurants and just when I’m walking down the street – kids who are throwing snit fits in public as their disinterested or seemingly powerless parents stand off to the side and let the rest of us listen to the whining – I just once wanna grab them HARD by the flesh on their twiggy upper arms, that soft flesh that really hurts – and I mean grab them bruise-inducing, five-finger-indentation-left-behind hard – and whisper Clint Eastwood–style in their dirty little ear: Listen up and listen fast, punk, ’cause I’m only saying this one ****** time: yer gonna shut the **** up right now and start doing what yer dumb*** mom and dad say from here on in or a special van is gonna pull up one day and just pluck you right off the ****** street and drop your *** on a plane to Iraq where you will be dropped out of the sky with nuthin’ but a parachute and a bag of white rice – no cash, no toys, no more SpongeBob Square***– ya follow?”

I’d hoped to do this post as a poll, using the new WordPress polling tool PollDaddy, so you could vote anonymously. But after signing up for the required PollDaddy account, requesting help on the Forums, and contacting an unresponsive WordPress Support, I still can’t get the poll to work. Are you a WordPress.com blogger who has used PollDaddy? If so, I’d love advice. (None of the suggestions on the Forums works for me.) I’d like to poll visitors about another author early next week. Thank you!

The Feb. 24, 2008, post has questions and answers about the annual Delete Key Awards.

© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.twitter.com/janiceharayda

Why ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is Bad Poetry and Other Literary Thoughts on the Olympics

Random literary thoughts on the Olympics:

1. Michael Phelps’s underwater dolphin kick is sports poetry.

2. NBC should fire the swimming analyst who keeps saying “he has swam” (as in “he has swam much better than this”).

3. The first word of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (“Oh”) is an example of the literary device known as anacrusis, a lead-in syllable or syllables that precede the first full foot.

4. The national anthem is written in anapestic meter, Dr. Seuss’s favorite. (What, you’ve never noticed the similarity between “And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air” and “I meant what I said / and I said what I meant …”?)

5. Why is “The Star-Spangled Banner” bad poetry? Take in the last line: “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” In a good poem, words are not interchangeable. You can’t switch them around with no loss in meaning or effect, because everything in the poem essential. Apart from a rhyme, what would the national anthem lose if Francis Scott Key had written “home of the free and the land of the brave” instead of “the land of the free and the home of the brave”?

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

Whitewash on ABC’s ‘Nightline’ – Cynthia McFadden Wimps Out in Interviewing Ishmael Beah About the Truthfulness of His ‘A Long Way Gone’

Is it a coincidence that Cynthia McFadden’s recent Nightline whitewash of the questions about the credibility of A Long Way Gone (a Sarah Crichton book) came so soon after she listed Apples and Oranges (a Sarah Crichton book) first among her favorite books of the summer at www.wowowow.com/post/cynthia-mcfadden-my-stepsons-book-69835? Or is this another example of literary backscratching? As we try to sort it out, Graham Rayman has posted a good analysis of what went wrong with McFadden’s timid and one-sided Aug. 5 story on Ishmael Beah, who says he spent more than two years child soldier in Sierra Leone (“Nightline’s Bad Journalism 101”) blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2008/08/nightlines_bad.php. You’ll find questions she could have asked here www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2008/08/03.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com