Death to All Cheerleaders : One Adolescent Journalist's Cheerful Diatribe Against Teenage Plasticity

Rating:
Summary: An interestingly telling (and offensive) comedy book
Review: This collection of articles and short stories wonderfully portrays the faults and fakeness of the pop-culture ruled youth. His articles are funny without fail. His efforts at fiction are mixed, with a couple pieces which are all out ridiculous paired with a stunningly introspective and thoughtful piece at the end.

Rating:
Summary: An interestingly telling (and offensive) comedy book
Review: This collection of articles and short stories wonderfully portrays the faults and fakeness of the pop-culture ruled youth. His articles are funny without fail. His efforts at fiction are mixed, with a couple pieces which are all out ridiculous paired with a stunningly introspective and thoughtful piece at the end.

Rating:
Summary: Patchy at best.
Review: To be perfectly honest, this book isn't very good. The writing and research on some, though not all, of the peices shows a certain amount of promise, and to someone who never really fit in with their contemporaries as an adolescent (like me) there is plenty to identify with (in theory at least), but the style and extremelyvarying degree of insight is off putting. Marty is clearly intelligent and interested in what he perceives as social commentary, but to me a lot of his critiques descend to the level of loud mouthed, egotistical ranting, tinged with blue language (which isn't something I'm particularly opposed to) in order maybe to lend his opinions some gravitas. However his attitude fails to carry much of his message; a lot of it comes off like a teenaged Denis Leary i.e. noisy and seemingly relevant, but actually pretty hollow and pointless. Someone else in this review list (it might be the guy beneath me) seems to actually know Marty, and his claim that the book was self published is interesting. I didn't know this, but now I do, if it's true, it explains a lot. Almost every teenaged outsider fills their mind with drivel for most of the time and convinces themselves that they are better and more worthwhile than their peers simply because they are different. It doesn't take a special kind of arrogance to assume that your teenage ramblings actually have any real merit, and anything worthwhile to contribute (mine certainly never did), but it does take a special kind of blindness to follow through and publish essays on the art of angst whose only real saving grace is the unintentional inshight they provide into the mind of the author. Marty will go far, when he curbs his feigned outrages.