Secrets of My Hollywood Life 6: There's No Place Like Home Review

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(More customer reviews)One of the first rules of writing is to write about what you know. The author has worked as a Hollywood journalist for years, interviewing the hottest teen idols in the business. What was so enjoyable about the series (okay, I only read #5 and #6) is that Calonita creates likeable protagonists, likeable antagonists, and likeable support characters. It is also a clean read, worthy of Disney Channel's ratings. Rather than giving a lot of fluff I can pick up in any gossip magazine, Calonita gives the reader an interesting story and peppers it with Hollywood Secrets, scripts from plays, commercials, or television series, and (most entertaining) media interpretations (read: gossip articles).
The sixth book is the culmination of the previous five where Kaitlyn Burke is a star that is highly sought, driven beyond exhaustion by her mother/manager and wonders how it would be to have a normal life. She has a great boyfriend, supportive best friends, a fantastic career, and Jimmy Choos shoes to die for. Heck, she has Jimmy Choos. My best shoes come from Nordstrom Rack. But she is not making any of her own decisions. Her personal assistant insists she go to college. Her mother pushes her to take on two major movies during her hiatus along with double booking her for whatever event gives her media exposure (like taking her driving test), her agent and publicist have another agenda while Kaitlyn doesn't know what SHE wants to do. So she follows the yellow brick road and gets in a car crash, wakes up, and she's normal. In fact, she has cooties.
The fresh take on this reverse Cinderella story is that Kaitlyn finds things in her new life that she loves, defines her priorities and then makes changes in her new life to help her friends and family members. She isn't Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life who ends back on the bridge having made no headway whatsoever. There is no fairy Godmother or Clarence or Glinda. It's Kaitlyn winning over friends and influencing people. Yes, she grows a backbone but I won't tell you how.
It's a fun, quirky, teen, chicklit read.

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After her brilliant run on Broadway and surviving the harsh concrete jungle of New York City, seventeen-year-old Hollywood "It Girl" Kaitlin Burke is back in L.A. starting a sitcom with her former-nemesis-now-BFF, Sky. The show is a huge success! In fact, maybe a little too huge, Kaitlin realizes, after a bad run-in with aggressive paparazzi puts her boyfriend Austinin danger. She wishes, once again, that she could have a normal life. But what Kaitlin doesn't realize is that her Hollywood life has had a positive influence on just about everyone she loves, and it takes a minor car accident and a nasty concussion to truly grasp how lucky she is. In Jen Calonita's sixth and final Secrets of My Hollywood Life novel, Kaitlin learns at last about the price of fame, the unending upside of friendship, and that there really is no place like home-even if it's Tinseltown.

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Pandemonium Review

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(More customer reviews)Pandemonium is fricking brilliant. Here's the plot summary version: As a child, Del was possessed by a demon, the Hellion, known for targeting young blond haired boys. There are many demons in this version of the US, archetypes from classic stories, comic books, etc. Del got better.
Except now he's an adult and beginning to realize that the demon never really left. Something inside of him is trying to break out and take over. He has to chain himself to his bed at night to prevent himself from destroying his home or hurting other people in his sleep. So, he goes on a quest to find a doctor who can help him, then one of the most messed up priests you could ever imagine. He runs into other demon possessed people. Almost gets killed multiple times... And finds out that things are much worse than he ever imagined.
Here's the gushing stream of consciousness version: Demons! Comic books! Possession! PK Dick! PK Dick as a demon! The nature of narrative! Reality/truth. Comic books! The Shug! Archetypes! Creative unconscious! Jung!
Daryl Gregory does something with Pandemonium that I forgot you could do with fiction. He talks pretty intense philosophy without ever once making it feel like that's what he's doing. The narrative is just so strong that you don't notice you're going over really intellectual and dense territory. Del is a strong main character, the events are completely improbable but you don't even notice it until after you've read the whole book and been utterly seduced by it.

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Coffee at Luke's: An Unauthorized Gilmore Girls Gabfest (Smart Pop series) Review

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(More customer reviews)"Coffee at Luke's: An Unauthorized 'Gilmore Girls' Gabfest" is a Smart Pop series collection of essays put together by Jennifer Crusie, whose introduction points out the utter appropriateness of a bunch of people taking about "Gilmore Girls." As an overview she points out that the show always kept in mind the basic rules for great dialogue: keep it moving, give everybody the best lines, talk up to your audience, and remember that the best dialogue is the stuff you can't hear. For each of these she has choice examples, which will immediately cause you to counter with your own personal favorites, and suddenly you are sitting down and joining the conversation the back cover proposes when it suggests you have some coffee at Luke's.
The first section is entitled, "It All Comes Out in Moron: Personal Relationships." "Whimsy Goes with Everything" by Heather Swain argues that everybody in Stars Hollow is a little eccentric, but that Kirk is something special. "Boys Not Allowed" by Jennifer Armstrong explains why Lorelai had trouble staying engaged long enough to get married, an argument that extends to Rory since the Gilmore Girls are too busy to be messed up by mere mortal men. Stephanie Whiteside focuses on a particular relationship in "When Paris Met Rory," contending that they have one of the most problematical relationships in television history.
The second section, "The Other Relationship: Parenting," focuses more on Lorelia and Emily. In "Mothers, Daughters, and Gilmore Girls," Janine Hiddlestone analyzes the fears, disappointments, and triumphs of being a mother in Stars Hollow, focusing in the end on the reversal of Lorelai and her parents' roles when Rory dropped out of Yale. Stephanie Lehmann focuses on the "The Best-Friend Mom" idea as one of the biggest fantasies and concludes that such an ideal was no longer the case by the end of the sixth season. Charlotte Fullerton's "In Defense of Emily Gilmore" makes the case for Emily as the much maligned but third Gilmore Girl and draws a series of strong parallels between Emily and Lorelai. Miellyn Fitzwater looks at "My Three Dads," analyzing Rory's trio of father figures of Luke, Richard and Christopher in terms of the time, money, and emotional support each provides here. However, her quantitative judgment strikes me as being skewed by the money factor because her conclusion as to who comes out ahead runs counter to by watching the show.
"Second Hamlet to the Right: Stars Hollow" is the third section. Sara Morrison provides "Your Guide to the Real Stars Hollow Business World," providing a harsh dose of reality as to how the town's commerce would do in the real world (sadly Taylor's Olde Fashioned Soda Shoppe has a better chance of surviving, much more so than Luke's Diner, which has a three-times better chance of making it than the Dragonfly Inn). My favorite essay is Jill Winters' "Happiness Under Glass: The Truth about Lorelai and Life in Stars Hollow," which makes a strong case for Lorelai's ambivalence towards the town in which she lives (the "Emily Junior" section is especially telling). Stephanie Rowe's "It's Not Luke's Stubble" makes the case for Stars Hollow being quintessential New England in terms of intellectual snobbery, money, history, heritage, and winter.
The next section is called "The Best Things in Life: Food, Books, and Sex," with one essay on each. "Dining with the Gilmores" is Gregory Stevenson's look at how food is the show's third passion behind talking and reading, which ends up seeing the show's secular morality as "The Chewy Moral Center." Maryelizabeth Hart's "Reading, Rory, and Relationships" makes a compelling case for books and writing being shorthand for character and emotional development. Kristen Kidder's examines the way the young women on the show pay for losing their virginity, dealing with what happens to Paris, Rory and Lane in an essay that had to be entitled, "'That's What You Get, Folks, For Makin' Whoopee.'"
The final section, "There's Reality and Then There's Lorelai: 'Gilmore Girls' and the Real World," begins with an interesting idea. Chris McCubbin recasts "Gilmore Girls" as a 1952 screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks and starring Katharine Hepburn as Lorelai and Audrey Hepburn as Rory. The rest of the cast list is equally intriguing (William Holden as Luke, Agnes Moorhead as Emily, Vivian Vance as Sookie). From that starting point McCubbin explores the roots of the show in the fast-talking screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s. Carol Cooper's "'Mama Don't Preach': Class, Culture, and Lorelai Gilmore as Bizarro-World Suffragette" reconsiders Lorelai's choices as being "so inexplicable she must be part of Bizzaro World," and concludes they are more bold than they are bizarre.
The back of the book includes a section of "Coffee at Luke's-isms" that explains veiled references in the essays from "7th Heaven" and "The actor became Alexis Bledel's real boyfriend off the show" to "Wicked Witch of the West" and "William Holden." This is the third completely unauthorized volume in the Smart Pop series that I have read and to date they have all provided food for thought in bite size morsels. So those essays that are not particularly interesting to read do not last long, which trades off against those where you would like to hear more of what the author has to say. Fans of "Gilmore Girls" will not be disappointed checking this out, especially since there are no new episodes to look forward to anymore.

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House and Philosophy: Everybody Lies (The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)I'm a big fan of the various series of books on philosophy and popular culture. (There are three such series that I'm aware of: "Popular Culture and Philosophy" from Open Court Publishing, the "Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series" from Wiley, and "The Philosophy of Popular Culture" from The University of Kentucky.) All of these series use popular culture -- TV shows, movies, music, popular books, sports, fads, etc. -- to illustrate important issues in philosophy and ethics. I have read several of the books in these series, and have been very impressed with all of them. I especially enjoyed reading "House and Philosophy: Everybody Lies" (which is part of the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series). As a lifelong student of philosophy, and a huge fan of the TV series "House, M.D.", I had to get this book.
"House, M.D." is a show about Dr. Gregory House, a brilliant but misanthropic diagnostician with a razor sharp wit and a contemptuous disregard for the feelings of others. House has little use for hospital rules or medical ethics. He openly rebels against any form of authority that would attempt to interfere with his ability to do what he thinks is best. He abuses his staff, insults his patients, manipulates his friends, alienates everyone who cares about him, ridicules anyone who disagrees with him, and takes pleasure in making others as miserable as he is. He is an unrepentant drug addict, a heavy drinker, and a frequent client of prostitutes. He is a militant atheist with nothing but contempt for religion and conventional morality. He will not hesitate to break the law or violate other people's rights in order to get what he wants. He can be brutally honest or a boldfaced liar, depending on his mood and his motives. House is basically a sociopath. He also saves lives. He does it by solving medical mysteries that completely baffle other doctors. Although he doesn't really care about his patients as human beings, he is an obsessive puzzle solver; and he will not rest until he has figured out what is wrong and how to treat it. You wouldn't want House as your family doctor. But, if you were dying of a mysterious illness, you would definitely want House on the case.
As you might imagine, this show raises a number of fascinating ethical and philosophical issues. Many of these issues are explored in this wonderful book: "House and Philosophy: Everybody Lies". One thing I really like about the essays in this book is that they are very well written and accessible, even to someone with no background in philosophy or medical ethics. Some of the other philosophy and popular culture books I have read have included essays that dealt with fairly esoteric philosophical issues, and would be more suitable for readers who have a fairly strong background in philosophy. But this book avoids that. I think that anyone who is a fan of "House, M.D." will find this book engaging, entertaining, enlightening, and easy to follow, even if they've never taken a single class in philosophy or ethics.
One caveat though: While you don't have to have a background in philosophy in order to understand and enjoy this book, you do need to have at least a basic familiarity with the TV show "House, M.D." -- its premise, its characters, the overall story arc, etc. If you're new to the show, then you may want to wait until you've watched at least the first three seasons before you try to tackle this book. (Note that the book deals mainly with themes from the first three seasons of the show; though there are a few references to events from the early episodes of the fourth season.) I would highly recommend this book for all "House, M.D." fans -- especially those with an interest in philosophy and ethics.

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An unauthorized look at the philosophical issues raised by one of today's most popular television shows: HouseHouse is one of the top three television dramas on the air, pulling in more than 19 million viewers for each episode. This latest book in the popular Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series takes a deeper look at the characters and issues raised in this Emmy Award-winning medical drama, offering entertaining answers to the fascinating ethical questions viewers have about Dr. Gregory House and his medical team.Henry Jacoby (Goldsboro, NC) teaches philosophy at East Carolina University. He has published articles primarily on the philosophy of mind and was a contributor to South Park and Philosophy(978-1-4051-6160-2).

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