Bright Young Things : London

Rating:
Summary: Just like the original ... and less!
Review: Brooke de Ocampo has hied herself to London and produced a book that does for the brilliant, educated, and exceptionally wealthy young elite of that city what her earlier title did for their counterparts in New York. The difference this time, unfortunately, is that she decided to let other Bright Young Things do the writing as well as open their homes and pose for photographs. And so while the writing in the original BYT was relatively unobjectionable celebrity journalism, a good deal of the writing in BYT London doesn't even rise to that level. On the other hand, the introduction by Nicholas Coleridge runs rings around its BYT counterpart by William Norwich, if only because it's so much less gushing in its praise for the people being profiled.

Apart from the writing, though, this book is a lot like the first one. Beautiful people, beautiful homes, beautiful children, beautiful photos. The selection of people covered seems, if anything, slightly broader than that in BYT. Whatever your reaction to the first book, I imagine it'll be about the same to this one ... unless, perhaps, you happen to be, or be related to, one of the people featured in it.