Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide

Since the author, dreading the prospect of my work reaching 35 pages, has in the past mercilessly cut some of my best material(e.g. tchotchke footnote) as my editor, I’ll give her one footnote asterisk as a grade, and will try to keep this short and to the point:

In the quiet taxonomy of this nation’s largest brick-and-mortar bookseller, this book is classified under “Self-Improvement.”

I kid you not. Is there a better reason not to buy it? But since I know about as much about the actual book as Mallarme did about Opera before he wrote his review of that medium, I’ll leave it there.
Rating: 1 / 5

There are very few Lisa Birnbachs, fewer still good anecdotalists,and virtually no readable satirists. Inappropriate displays of fragmentary erudition do not make a novelist-merely a candidate for more training in the art & craft of writing. This writer NEEDS an original or novel idea . Fragments picked from here and there can never make a page of writing–perhaps a vertiginous patchwork quilt which causes nausea, but never pleasure. Living in Washington is not the same for inspiration as La Place des Voges or chez une soiree of the Guermantes.
Rating: 1 / 5

Jonathan Swift wrote in “A Modest Proposal” a detailed exegesis on his suggested method to end famine in Ireland: cook children. His precise and methodical presentation appalled many; and awoke at least some to the appalling misdeeds of English rule over the colonialized island. Let me put it more directly: suppose you were to read Gretchen Rubin’s book as if you sincerely wished to learn and apply her rules for utilizing (an ugly word that is rarely so apt) P, M, F, and S. The overwhelming detail of her codification of the ways of the material world, as well as her left jab, right cross combinations of appalling anecdotes, should provide the verbal equivalent of electric shock therapy or perhaps primal recognition such that even the crassest and most-blinkered of such (hypothetical) readers might be expected to be stunned into a consciousness that vanity is indeed vanity, that all is vanity, as the Good Book says. This, then, is the ameliorative purpose of her sedulously compiled, exquisitely presented, and felicitously expressed volume. Also it’s great to observe how microscopically shallow are the actions, thoughts, and trappings of celebrity. Finally, there isn’t one of us who hasn’t adhered to at least some of the rules discovered, like natural law, by our writer; which like all fine writing this book causes one to realize; so that the rule of self-discovery is honored. Read, mark, learn, inwardly digest, and fear to outwardly display from now on.
Rating: 5 / 5