Rating: 
Summary: Great Satire.
Review: For city folk only!! Anderson touches on all things representative of our society, or at least urban society, today--the good, the bad and yes, the superficial. This is no story for simpletons, or for anyone looking for heartwarming nostalgia. I was thoroughly amused!!
Rating: 
Summary: Down deep it's shallow
Review: The characters are plastic and acquisitive. New York Magazine says that New York is filled with these people. Is there life beyond the Hudson and Silicon Valley? If you don't believe there is, or what there is can't be worthwhile, you'll love the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Airport fodder for junkies
Review: Only those who value the literary acumen of Beverly Hills hair colorists and the L.A. Times who solicit their opinions, will find anything of human insight or passion in this pile of redolent garbage.
Rating:
Summary: No Bonfire, But Amusing
Review: Anderson's prose and clever dialogue keep this, too long, novel from turning into a bad joke. The character as caricature technique has been done much better by others, but the hit or miss satire and humor hit's often enough to make it work. The comparison to Tom Wolfe is inevitable and, I think, intentional. Wolfe's "Masters of the Universe" were so perfect because their real life counterparts were so ridiculously over-the-top to begin with. Anderson doesn't stand a chance in competing with his Hollywood / Silicon Valley / '90s caricatures. Even Wolfe had trouble repeating his feat in his own Man In Full. Besides the Hollywood stereotypes aren't new and have been done to death. Nevertheless, I found the book amusing and, if nothing else, good for conversation.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant satire of how we live now.
Review: Jeez, the guy below has got to lighten up! This is a wickedly fun read that never drags. I put it up there with A Man In Full as books I'd had out to visiting aliens to explain life at the end of the 20th century. The fact that I don't like a protagonist much or that a book doesn't make me want to "be a better person" doesn't preclude me from enjoying every page of it. Maybe listening to Bob Dylan clear his throat for 45 minutes on a CD makes you wanna go out and hug a tree or give flowers to people at airports, but I'll take Kurt Andersen anyday. A big, fat, wonderful novel I'm sure I'll read again.
Rating: 
Summary: FROM 5 STARS TO ONE STAR
Review: THE FIRST THREE QUARTERS OF THIS BOOK WAS WORTH 5 STARS, THE LAST QUARTER WAS A ONE STAR. THE LAST 100 PAGES WERE PREDICTABLE AND BORING. I FELT THE AUTHOR JUST WANTED TO GET THE BOOK OVER WITH. TOO BAD.
Rating:
Summary: Smug, smarmy, snide, cynical and ultimately...schmaltzy
Review: Bob Dylan once said that the best way to judge the worth of any work of art, whether musical, pictorial or literary, was to assess how the work made you feel. If you felt inspired to become a better person, then the work of art could be deemed "good." If not, then it could be labeled "bad." By Dylan's standard, what to make of a book that made you wish that the author had dropped a house on the major characters? "Very bad," I'd guess. The words "slimy" and "ugly" come to mind as well. Who could possibly care about such awful, shallow, smug people? And I'm talking about the "hero and heroine" of the book, not the cartoon bad guys Andersen wants you to abhor. Another sense one gets from this book, and maybe it's intentional, is that it seems to be actually written by a computer. (Maybe Andersen will admit to this "hoax" in the next week or two.) How else to explain the absolute lack of any descripion of weather of any kind in the book and the absence of any animals in the story who do not get killed (the pet cat and the starving jungle orangutans slaughtered by villagers, come to mind here)? It is one thing to write a book about people who seem to lack a heart and a soul and it is quite another thing to embody (if that's the word) this quality. It makes the book "creepy" in a way that would chill Stephen King immortal soul. The style seems to reflect what would occur if you entered every mention of famous people, companies and events from a year's worth of People Magazine into a computer's memory and asked it to spit out some random connections of same in the form of a story. An ultimately pointless exercise. All in all, this book brings to mind Gandhi's quote that when he saw how cold-hearted the educated were, he trembled for the future of humankind. By Dylan's criteria, this book is THAT bad. One saving grace: the final two-page chapter intimates that the "hero" and his daughter MAY have died in a plane crash. A last-minute bit of contrition from the author? One can only hope.
Rating:
Summary: Chilling and Hilarious
Review: This novel of contemporary manners is as good as the genre ever gets. I much preferred it to "A Man In Full, " and I am usually a Tom Wolfe fan. It is hard to imagine that this is a first novel. The restaurant scenes are priceless. Don't miss it.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty much a waste of a lot of time
Review: Well, if you,ve checked the first 68 reviews you don't need mine, but... the book is sporatically (very sporatically) amusing and I don't find it plotless as others do-it's that the characters are paper thin. I think that is the main roblem. Also, 400 pages would have provided enough space for the "better stuff."
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding satire
Review: George Will hated this book, calling it pretentious and shallow, and reflecting the worst excesses of a society in decline (or something like that). Mr. Will is, happily, wrong. It is a wonderful satire of New York/De Coast society. Post-modern irony, George, when one refers to a little girl being dressed in Ann Demeulemeister! I could not put this book down. However, I don't think I would recommend it to readers who don't watch television or who don't know anything about computers.
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