Rating: 
Summary: What a disappointment
Review: I really really wanted to like this book. With a subtitle like "In praise of difficult women," it's gotta be good, right? Wrong. It is, in fact, page after page of self-indulgent maundering by someone who confuses being able to put together a complex sentence with actually having something to say. After about two hundred pages I got the strong feeling I was listening to a spoiled litle girl dressed in her mommy's clothes, laying down the law about things she knows nothing about. Too bad--now nobody will be able to write a real book about difficult women, since Ms. Wurtzel just thoroughly killed the subject without actually saying anything. This book is one of the best arguments against drugs I have ever seen: Ms. Wurtzel seems to have arrested at the age of thirteen in terms of ability to see the world as it really is, as well as in her extreme self-absorption. I am confused, also, by the total lack of editing. Whatever happened to cutting out the excess verbiage? If that had been done before publication, this would have been a magazine article, not a thumping big doorstop of a thing. I wish I had watched reruns instead.
Rating: 
Summary: It's not about being bad, it's about being beautiful!
Review: Alix Kates Shulman wrote it better years ago in "Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen." The beautiful women drink booze, swallow pills, and die young, usually by their own hand. Ms. Wurtzel claims to be interested in "bad" or "bitchy" women, but she's really interested in beauty. Nearly all of her bitches are beautiful, and in most of her examples, got famous, got reputations, got attention, got everything based on their looks. She dwells lovingly and endlessly on the beauty of Edie Sedgwick, a Warhol babe, who died of an overdose at age 27. Nowhere is there any information about what Ms. Sedgwick did to merit "bitch" or "bad" or to serve as any kind of example of women attempting to realize themselves and their potential through the vehicle of "badness" or rebellion against the stifling good girl image. Ms. Sedgwick was just Sixties fashion, another photogenic, thin girl in front of a lens, looking strung-out beautiful instead of Jean Shrimpton beautiful. One can trace the heroin high fashion look in today's magazines straight back to Edie.The problem with this book is that Ms. Wurtzel's Harvard credentials, facility with words, and manic energy, can lull the reader into thinking there's actually something being said here. That this might actually be a serious work of some sort of scholarship. In the end, the message is that only beautiful girls can be bad and bitchy, just like only beautiful girls can be models and actresses or marry a prince. Most of them wind up dead way before their time. There's a book out there, somewhere, about the value of standing up for yourself and rebelling against the rules that choke women from birth, but this isn't it.
Rating: 
Summary: Four stars for merit
Review: I have read this book twice because it did something for me. Wurtzel wrote that "guys like girls who are sexy, not slutty." To be honest, I had never known that; I thought all guys liked an easy ticket. Hell, no one was ever around to teach me how to be a nice girl so I used my instincts. So it was really nice to see the simple facts of girlhood documented in this book. She goes beyond "Gen-X" writing because she really does care about the girls she's talking about. But I wish that she could've controlled her anger a little. Sometimes I thought she was making fun of me, the female-reader-college- student-in search of the truth. I happen to use Clairol Herbal Essences Shampoo and she kind of said that there might not be "enough of that to go around" in my age group. What gives? I really like her rebellious style, especially when she talks about yucky men like Joey Buttafuoco and O.J. Simpson. But I want to know why she bashed Anna Quindlen and Gloria Steinem. If she has personal dirty laundry with them, I want to know about it. It's only fair. "Bitch" is a useful book because she's the only writer to tell the truth about O.J. Simpson and Amy Fisher and Princess Di and Margeaux Hemingway without sugar-coating anything.
Rating:
Summary: The fool on the hill sees the world going 'round
Review: Art and literature are filled with references to what the Beatles called "The Fool on the Hill." Ms. Wurtzel spends considerable time and energy establishing her credentials as a fool (she admits to being foolish) and this is what many readers will focus on and react to in a negative way. She does, however, have a vision paid for by her foolishness and benefiting from a perspective that is well outside the mainstream. One analogy she uses is that "all clams get sand inside their shells, but not all of them make pearls." There are pearls galore in this difficult to read but extremely thought-provoking work. If ideas matter to you at all this book is WELL worth the effort it takes to get to the pearls. Her extensive treatment of Nicole Brown Simpson's "participation" in her cruel fate is worth the price of the book by itself. Do not, however, skip directly to that chapter because it cannot stand alone - without Delilah, Amy Fisher, Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction - and Elizabeth Wurtzel.
Rating:
Summary: There's a point or two in there, somewhere...
Review: I was very anxious to read Elizabeth Wurtzel's new book, my anxiety was relieved once I got hold of it, and was quickly replaced by boredom and confusion. One of the reason's I so looked forward to reading her, was that her previous book was so well written. It's fairly sad to suffer the many bio's, and autobio's of folks out there looking for an extension on their 15 minutes of fame, but the worst is that the vast majority of these books(and so many things published today) are poorly written, or written for a market, that publishers assume, has about a 3rd grade reading level. Prozac nation was honest and well written. Bitch is honest, and a rambling, meandering mess. The first 100 pages are of little use. The next hundred serve to support one idea, and it just pretty much peaks in the third hundred pages (blink and you'll miss it), then it's mercifully over. I will say she makes a few dynamic, and original points in the book, that made it worth looking at, but I put this down as a sophomore slump. I hope she continues to produce, I look forward to someone with this kind of talent, putting out something coherent.
Rating:
Summary: She's an airhead.
Review: I went to hear her give a reading of this book. She had no idea what she was doing/talking about. She would read random bits of the book and at one point even grimaced and said, "huh, I wonder why I wrote that". When asked about the cover, she said that it had been suggested to her and she just went along with it. She hadn't even noticed her nipple was airbrushed off. She talked about how women had to go through bad points like drug addiction to get ahold of their lives (mind you, if she had said SOME women, I wouldn't have minded). Then made comments like, "like when you're sitting by the phone waiting for a guy to call and you forget to eat or do anything for a few days" (no, 'fraid I can't relate). She could give no good reason for the women she picked to talk about in the book. She seemed incapable of answering any questions and it sure didn't seem to be because she was nervous or shy or anything like that, she just couldn't string enough thoughts together -- my roommate and I wondered how she made it out of Harvard! (Plus she was 20 minutes late cuz she went to get a Smoothie... I feel if Gloria Steinem and other more famous authors can manage to be on time {allowing for traffic and other mix ups},she could be.)
Rating: 
Summary: Willing to bare her breasts for her beliefs
Review: When I first saw the cover of this book, I thought it sad that in today's world even as intelligent a woman as Elizabeth Wurtzel has to take off her shirt to sell her book. After reading the book, though, I have to admire Ms. Wurtzel for believing so strongly in her message that she will pose topless on the cover of her own book. The only way for a woman to express her personal power in today's world is through her sexuality, Ms. Wurtzel is saying, and to express her power she bares her breasts.
Rating:
Summary: Pffft!
Review: "Vapid" doesn't come close to encapsulating my dismissal of this book. It's the kind of "GenX" writing that makes me want to lie about my age: if this woman is an example of my "peers", then I'm moving to Liechtenstein. It's not the barrage of pop-culture quotes or the trendy shallowness of the whole enterprise -- it's the fact that we're allegedly supposed to give a darn about it. It's also another championing of a one-sided standard I find insufferable. If I wrote a book called "A**hole: In Praise of Boneheaded Men", do you think I could get away with it?
Rating:
Summary: Liked the cover, don't care for the text
Review: Elizabeth Wurtzel has beautiful breasts, unluckily for her readers she bared just one, on the cover, and that only partially. Which makes this not a convincing enough a case to buy this book, especially since not only does Elizabeth not do a well enough job proving to us she is a bitch, we don't see any more of her than this on the cover. But we have seen here for the first time, it must be admitted, the ultimate PR move: a naked picture of the book's beautiful authoress, beckoning us with her eyes, "Come and get it." Too bad what we get is not worth coming over for, although, if this is the closest you have to a naked female, it just may well make you come.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining and thought-provoking
Review: Wurtzel does a great job of analyzing several legendary difficult women.
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