Why do more people watch American Idol than the nightly news? What is it about Paris Hilton’s dating life that lures us so? Why do teenage girls — when given the option of “pressing a magic button and becoming either stronger, smarter, famous, or more beautiful” — predominantly opt for fame? In this entertaining and enlightening book, Jake Halpern explores the fascinating and often dark implications of America’s obsession with fame. He travels to a Hollywood home for aspiring child actors and enrolls in a program that trains celebrity assistants. He visits the offices of Us Weekly and a laboratory where monkeys give up food to stare at pictures of dominant members of their group. The book culminates in Halpern’s encounter with Rod Stewart’s biggest fan, a woman from Pittsburgh who nominated the singer for Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
Fame Junkies reveals how psychology, technology, and even evolution conspire to make the world of red carpets and velvet ropes so enthralling to all of us on the outside looking in.
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When I was twenty years old, I took some time off from college and moved to Prague. It was the sort of inspired, half-baked decision that you can only make when you are twenty and clueless. A few weeks into my stay in Prague, I found an apartment and settled into a routine of doing very little ' wandering around the city, reading, and living off the money I'd saved. Almost immediately I sensed that it was a special time to be living there. This was back in 1995, and the city was teaming with artists, expatriates and lingering tourists, living in two-dollar-a-night hostels. Everyone there was writing a novel, or a play, or at least some essays. The apartment that I took over ' a drafty subterranean vault beneath a neighborhood pub ' had been the home of a long string of expatriated Americans before me, and the closets were filled with an array of dusty, discarded and abandoned manuscripts, most of them uncompleted.
Eventually, I got swept up in the bohemian spirit of it all and set to work on piece of writing of my own, a screenplay to be precise. The screenplay, which was called the Papaya Trap, was about a con artist who falls in love with a beautiful one-armed girl.
The truly transformative event of my time in Prague, however, was my decision to investigate my family's roots in this part of the world. I knew that some of my ancestors had once lived in Prague, and on a whim I telephoned my great-uncle (Joe Garray) in America, and asked him if we had any relatives who were still here. "No they all perished in the holocaust," he said. But I kept pushing him and eventually he told me that the man who saved him from the Germans still lived in a farm house in Slovakia at the edge of the Tatra Mountains. A week later I took a commuter plane to Bratislava and then a train to the small town where this man lived.
I showed up at his door after sundown and he came to the gate cautiously, leaning heavily on a wooden cane, face trembling and bald except for a few long loops of white hairs, his feet engulfed in a swarm of mutts who guarded his every step. After trying to explain who I was for almost five minutes, he led me through the back door and into his kitchen. It was bare room, illuminated in dingy fluorescent light, occupied only by a few stools, a couch covered in dog hairs, and a hissing radiator. Here he told me about hiding my uncle and their numerous close calls with the Slovak Gestapo. When the situation at the farmhouse became too heated, they fled to the mountains in the cold of winter and lived like hermits for six months. More than anything else this story convinced me that I wanted to dedicate my life to becoming a professional storyteller.
After college, I landed an internship at The New Republic. My chief responsibility at the magazine was researching and fact-checking. I spent hours, days, and weeks looking for correct spellings and exact dates. Being a quick fact-checker was always a point of pride among the office grunts like myself, and though it was an obscure and largely useless skill, I found it quite helpful in tracking down information on dangerous and outlandish towns. On my lunch breaks and in between assignments I searched for clues, and gradually I found them ' reports of holdouts living on lava fields, windswept sandbars, and desolate arctic glaciers. I spent Sunday afternoons combing the web with a smattering of search terms like 'squatter,' 'won't leave home,' and 'people call him crazy.' I became friendly with the press office at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and I pumped them for ideas. It turned into something of a hobby.
Eventually, the short magazine pieces that I wrote on people and their homes attracted the interest of a literary agent who convinced me to write a book, which I then did. This book ' Braving Home (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) ' allowed me to quit my job and become a fulltime, self-employed writer.
I picked this book up after seeing the long ABC 20/20 segment on it and was hooked within minutes. Jake Halpern unveils the strange and wild obsessions people have with fame. I read his previous book, Braving Home, as well, and immensely enjoyed his writing style. Just like Braving Home, Fame Junkies is a rollicking good read, with compelling characters, situations and insights. I couldn't put it down. Highly recommended.
This incoherent mess of a book is from a supposedly intellectual guy who came up with what he thought was a clever idea to sell to editors (why we like fame) and then brought together a bunch of unrelated subjects without truly doing serious homework on the subject. He doesn't adequately define what he means by fame, selects random facts and stories that often don't relate to the topic (at one point discussing alcoholism?) and doesn't seem to even understand some of the people he is writing about.
His introduction chapter is a bizarre mish-mash of stream-of-consciousness ramblings about "fame" or "celebrity." Instead of using it to define his topic and explain what the book is about, he concludes (from what I can figure out) that the world has had famous people since the caveman days and that it may all be tied to an addiction trigger in the brain. If that doesn't make sense to you, then it makes even less sense when reading the book.
The author doesn't really address the title topic and picks some odd subjects instead. A small-town talent agent. A Hollywood bus tour. A Pittsburgh woman who wants Rod Stewart to have a star on the Walk of Fame. An actors' retirement home. These are all peripheral to fame and don't explain why we're a society of fame junkies. It's like he focuses on clever sideshows and not the main stage--if he were writing about the popularity of the Ringling Brothers circus, he would do a story on the person selling cotton candy and the guy cleaning the elephant cage instead of telling us what was going on in the three rings or why we like to watch the trapeze act!
In one chapter he tries to bring spirituality into it but falters since he seems to have a drive-by view of Christianity. He merely quotes more statistics and creates a false picture of religion in society. Then he abandons it completely to finish the chapter by focusing on the woman who "worships" Rod Stewart. It just doesn't make sense.
Since he is a New York Times contributor and an NPR writer/producer, this seems like an accumulation of public-radio style stories that deal with a topic without truly covering it in any depth (and the positive reviews for this book must be coming from similar East Coast Sunday Times magazine readers who think it's brilliant to have someone write about a subject that they know nothing about). It was more of a chance for him to have an excuse to interview a few people he admires (the Edge from U2!). He thinks of himself as very clever yet he never really says anything of substance. In the end you won't know much more about why we're fame junkies than when you started.
This is a terrific ,intelligently written exploration of our fame obsessed culture...Entertaining, engaging book that was simply hard to put down. I am a psychiatric nurse, and I really enjoyed authors' use of newer psychological theories to explain the fenomena of fame obsession.I am passing this book to my friends at work.
