Celebrity Detox: (The Fame Game)
by Rosie O'Donnell
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Book Reviews of Celebrity Detox: (The Fame Game)
Book Review: Remember the 90s when Rosie was just a lovable big-kid who said, "Kids are Punny?" Well, she's a bitter, lesbian militant, now!!
Summary: 1 Stars
My interest in picking up O'Donnell's book--interest being a relative word--was merely to see if A) O'Donnell in her own words is really as vile as her rhetoric and feuds with seemingly everyone indicate and B) if so, to know what one of America's domestic enemies thinks. After "reading" this book--one cannot read it per se because it's written in primer language and has the vocabulary and grammar of an elementary school kid--I can honestly assert Trump was absolutely, 100% right!!!! O'Donnell's a bully, self-destructive, paranoid, self-righteous, elitist, and prone to conspiracy theories 24/7. It's fair to say I was going in to this book with prejudices, but the worst implication is that all of them were borne out by O'Donnell's own, at times, scary trends of thought.
As I alluded to, the presentation of Celebrity Detox is aggravatingly simple-minded: the print is for four-year-olds, the writing and word choice is abnormally basic, and the "intellect" of O'Donnell as her written word represents it is really shameful. She probably didn't go to college, and it egregiously shows.
Celebrity Detox, to O'Donnell, is the process in which a quasi-celebrity like her readjusts to "normal" life after the blinding glare and sensationalized existence of being in the spotlight for a certain time. The ordeal with O'Donnell's take on detoxing from this celebrity is that it oftentimes strays into the utter, elitist, high-minded conceptualization which the normal, average American just can't and shouldn't relate to. For instance, O'Donnell has the unmitigated gall to grieve about missing being with her kids--she's g*y, so most of her kids are adopted; her marriage was voided by California's SC and is a sham--while having worked on her successful talk show! Many working Americans are familiar with this phenomenon: it's called balancing work and family life, yet to elitists like O'Donnell, this comes apparently as an unreasonable shock.
Also discomforting is reading O'Donnell's mortifying revelations about how stunted she is in her personal development as a result of being a quasi-celebrity. We all know celebrities are spoilt and can't do much of anything for themselves, yet O'Donnell's admission takes the cake. She actually has the audacious nerve to blame her career success as the culprit for why she apparently can't park a car properly. That's right; as shameful as this would be to admit were it a normal person, O'Donnell seems to sinisterly revel in admitting that she can't even park an automobile properly!!!! This is just another, flagrant example of the inequity that exists between the visibility/influence of celebrities and their impotence and ineptitude.
O'Donnell also reveals that she's estranged from average Americans by her elitist worship of fellow lib celebrities like Barbra Streisand. The seemingly unrelenting pages she devotes to Streisand worship is really a sickness; one would believe that Streisand were God the way O'Donnell keeps exaggeratedly vaunting her. Implicating O'Donnell as being out of touch with average Americans is the fact that she arrogantly goes on about how she created a documentary, by following Streisand from tour stop to tour stop, about Streisand's alleged inspiration to many people. However, only trivial/elitist people would really believe that Streisand was an object worthy of adoration when there are so many better, female role models out there. Condoleeza Rice (1st woman Secretary of State), Laura Bush (AIDS work, librarian), and Lynne Cheney (children's author, US historian) easily trump Babs.
In one passage in the book, O'Donnell really revolts people by confessing that she used to take a bat to her fingers and hands and break her bones!!!! If this isn't further, corroborative proof of celebrities being poisonous and unbalanced in general, then nothing is proof enough.
The most egregious offense in O'Donnell's alleged, tell-all book is her glaring and cowardly omission of confessing what an anti-American, treasonous enemy-emboldener she is!!!! From her wild accusations on the View, we all know O'Donnell is a 911 "Truther" (precipitously believing the US attacked itself), humanizes terrorists (infamously uttering that terrorists are moms and dads too!), and accuses the US military of killing Iraqi civilians!!!! However, she dastardly dodges addressing any of these provocative allegations which rightly got her terminated from the View.
O'Donnell also indulges in a martyr complex when she imagines herself having been victimized by Trump. The intellectually honest human realizes that Trump did a noble thing by showing Christian-type forgiveness to the young woman who was in his pageant, yet O'Donnell instigated character *ss*ssination on him. When Trump defensibly fought back, O'Donnell's misdirected attitude was that SHE was the one attacked.
Additionally, O'Donnell also divulges how double-dealing her untrustworthy character is as she really derogates Barbara Walters excessively. This is particularly treasonous when she spends the beginning of the book singing Walters' praises...only to tear her down throughout the book. Celebrity Detox is instructive only in that it enforces much of what the Silent Majority (real, normal Americans) rightly thinks of celebrities: they're liberal and unstable and disgusting.
Book Review: But Detoxed She Isn't.
Summary: 1 Stars
First of all, it's important to note here that many Amazon reviewers of this book for some reason insist "either you love Rosie or you think she's the antichrist". HUH? Even after reading this slender volume, I still don't know what they mean, unless they're saying "if you don't adore Rosie passionately the way I do, it could ONLY be because you're a homophobe who's still upset Rosie finally 'came out' years ago". Answer? Not at all. First, Ms. O'Donnell simply was never the center of my universe and still isn't. I was never able to bear even watching her show, much less her movies: over the grinding, nonstop, & supposedly humorous wisecracks always stirred those strangely distracted, anxious, angry eyes that consistently gave the lie to her antic behaviour and words. And this profound dichotomy made all the insistent funniness even more insistently unfunny. Second, long ago when Rosie O'Donnell declared she was a lesbian, my only reaction was surprise that anyone had ever thought she was anything else. Did it invalidate her or her show? I didn't think so then or now. Does it invalidate her book? Of course not. So let's get rid of this "or the antichrist" comparison, right here, despite the many Reviewers below who make clear they've taken on yet another talk-show personality as their personal messiah.
What DOES invalidate her book is her self-absorption. This book is really just one more piece of kindling in the downright torch song of sob-sister celebrity books that now stare out at us from every side of any franchise bookstore the moment we cross its threshold.
And why is this book just so much kindling? Upon reading it I see no evidence whatsoever of Ms. O'Donnell's De-tox from the addiction of fame. True detoxification means the former addict absolutely withdraws from the all-consuming seduction that held her/him imprisoned in its thrall; and having successfully withdrawn, absolutely eschews anything to do with the locus of addiction lest she be trapped again. What merit on its own and what possible help for others does a book about detoxing truly have when its author's own addiction is still patently obvious? Look: for a "star" to write book after book after book about herself is the opposite of celebrity detox. Among many other things, such publications and the publicity they predictably create either guarantee her a continued toehold under the fickle celebrity spotlight, however tenuous; or are a desperate bid for such: it all depends on whether the audience still cares or the torchlight's (and torch song's) moved on as it invariably, invariably does. Sure: Ms. O'Donnell can name names, can claim claims, & make any number of declarative statements about the pain of this particular addiction. And so many fans here react immediately: Oh, look how honest She is! Look how brave! See how unflinching!
But hey: I've known heroin/alcohol/and coke junkies who can all talk this exact same kind of talk: the betrayed childhoods, the crashing disappointments of adolescence, the betrayed careers -- and yesireebob: so honestly! So bravely! So unflinchingly! Trouble is: all that apparent unblinking bald insight, right there before one's eyes -- and yet simultaneously, the still-being-100%-addicted to their drug of choice. The not having truly let go even one single iota.
Enshrined as it is now as our state Religion, pop psychology and its psychobabble incantations actually pass muster daily for Real Insight, Real Honesty, Real Progress. We can babble away and as long as we hit the right buzzwords and observe the PC shibboleths, we can even fool ourselves at least some if not most of the time. And fool almost everyone else almost all of the time. Just witness the quite sincere fan reviews here of O'Donnell's book & how they insist her selfless motives in writing this book are proven by the fact that she doesn't even sink to the level of advertising her latest book, "Celebrity Detox".
...And THEN what? Why, right above those same reviews is a little video viewing "box". Click on it, gentle reader, and observe this same celebrity Rosie O'Donnell doing exactly that: indeed, not just advertising, but even throwing in a two-fer pitch. And a two-fer pitch more than once, mind you.
Damning her? No, this review doesn't. For above the smile in that pitch one sees the same strangely distracted, very anxious, and very angry eyes in this celebrity that I've always seen: the unmistakable eyes of a Fame Addict; indeed one who's still actively addicted, just as this book itself proves. There is none of the peace of the deeply released and detoxified in those eyes. Rosie O'Donnell might truly want to stop the whirling high of fame's narcotic half-nelson and get free once and for all; who knows? But detoxed she ain't.
Book Review: Really Great - Very Quick Read and Powerful
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an exceptionally well written book. As a fan of Rosie's blogs, I didn't know what to expect, but she is not just an average writer. She writes with incredible honesty and almost artistic prose. I am yet another person who picked this up in the bookstore, tried to find out what happened on the day of the big fight with Elizabeth, and read the whole thing...and I am normally a very slow reader (and I hate reading for pleasure because I am in graduate school and have enough to read!) Anyway, unless I missed it - she actually skipped the Elizabeth fight. She did include the Kelly Rippa feud, the Ching Chong issue, and of course Donald Trump. Her opinions on him are made much more clear and the whole thing has so much more context now. The subsequent fallout from the Trump debacle (specifically, her relationship with Barbara Walters) was actually a big piece of this book, as she tied it back to betrayal issues with her own mother when she was being abused by a man.
Like the other reviewers said, the book gives a lot of insight into the real Rosie. She is clearly not this caricature portrayed in the news for the last year. Also, the book (like her) has also been poorly represented in the media. She does not really call Barbara Walters "tired." She's not unaware that she has abandonment issues, and sees Barbara Walters as a mother figure. It's a big part of what she talks about. (Some news show psychologist was psychoanalyzing Rosie and Barbara in this manner, but Rosie actually described the issue better herself.) The passage about Walters being "tired" is taken out of context from a letter to her brother where she writes about the *entire* situation on the View. She felt like the new kid in school - but a new kid that drives a Mercedes (I believe that was the exact line.) They asked her to be herself - but then to stay in a box at the same time. At some point, she talks about Barbara in the context of the overall view environment. In another page of brutal honesty, she admits that she believed Donald Trump's claim that Barbara Walters said that she regretted hiring her. The emotional carnage of this kind of betrayal (after past betrayals by her mother which she goes into) is pretty rough.
This is not 150 pages of Rosie whining and playing the victim really. It is a very behind-the-scenes look at a very complex woman (and a complex show) who is possibly more in touch with her emotions than anyone I've ever seen. She has an understanding of interpersonal dynamics that is remarkable. She may come across a little self important and emotionally strange at times, but that's how it is. For example, she e-mailed Elizabeth "I love you and I'll always protect you" at one point - in response to a little change that Elizabeth made in one of the show's segments. Rosie also saw Elizabeth's emerging independence (taking out the earpieces that they wear on the show) as a sign that she was converting her to be a better person or something. Maybe that was a little over the top.
I can see why she does not want to do interviews about this book. The stories and emotions in here are raw. Not everything is included, and if she were interviewed, it would be likely that she'd be taken into areas that she's not ready to discuss. She reveals something about a man coming into her room at night, and leaves it vague. It's pretty obvious that some kind of sexual abuse occurred, and I am still confused about whether or not her mother believed her when it kept happening after they cut down the tree (where the man supposedly came in from) - but those details are not really the point. The point is to think about her feelings when she told her mother that a man was abusing her and was told "you lie like a rug."
Book Review: Life after fame isn't always Rosie
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an unprecedented book by an unprecedented Star!
Just like Rosie O'Donnell, "Celebrity Detox" is candid, humorous at times, compassionate, clever, and incredibly thought-provoking. If you think you know everything about Ro, you will be surprised after reading this. And, if you detest Ro and believe that she is the antichrist then you will also get a new understanding of the real Ro. Because she is nothing at all like that lunatic the press portray her as.
You can you say what you want about Rosie O'Donnell. I am sure there is nothing she hasn't heard and there's nothing she cannot take. But you cannot read "Celebrity Detox" and call Ro a coward. In the book, Ro courageously discusses her life after hitting it big and how her brief stint on "The View" came to a thunderous halt. This is the first book ever written by an A-list star that frankly details their own fame in such a forthright and impartial way. Through "Celebrity Detox," Ro has forever ripped that mysterious veil of secrecy off of the MSM.
As Ro has said, she wants to "let the book speak for itself." Who else can write a best-seller without doing any type of promotion? Ro doesn't care about being popular or about making lots of money or being famous. Maybe that's why she was able to write such a riveting and original book? This book was not written for money or for attention (another myth that the media tries to pass off as "fact.") All the proceeds from "Celebrity Detox" are going to Ro's Broadway Kids foundation. I wonder if a certain big-mouth billionaire gives even a tenth of what Ro does?
"Celebrity Detox: (The Fame Game)" is somewhat of a follow-up to Ro's extremely successful NY Times Bestseller, Find Me. It's hard to say which book I prefer because they are both works of art. Maybe that's also why Ro is so controversial (and unconventional?) Because art always attracts mixed feelings and is usually subjective. To some, they could be looking at a beautiful rose, and to others they might see something terrifying. Perhaps through her writings, Ro is trying to convey that art can be whatever you make of it?
Like a fine hand-made wicker basket, this book is woven together very intricately. Ro discusses her childhood in certain passages that may have a prevalence or a similarity to her most recent situations. There are parts of this book that are very sad, shocking and extremely tragic. Ro is especially delicate in these passages. But, Ro is nothing if not (always) candid. She gets it all out in "Celebrity Detox." And, Rosie doesn't care what the repercussions are because she has the truth on her side!
If you enjoyed Ro's latest book, I also recommend Find Me and Ro's 2006 documentary All Aboard: Rosie's Family Cruise. And I also recommend, Journal Revolution: Rise Up and Create! Art Journals, Personal Manifestos and Other Artistic Insurrections which includes some of Ro's art!
I have come to really admire Rosie because she gave so much of herself in this book. And, Ro gives me hope. She gives me hope that there are still decent people out there. She gives me hope that people still care. She gives me hope that no matter what life befalls there can still be mirth and a promise of a new start. Rosie O'Donnell is my shero.
Book Review: What Rosie Needs to Do Next
Summary: 3 Stars
Towards the end of this book, O'Donnell describes celebrity as an intersection, if you don't know how to negotiate it, you get run over, like Anna Nicole Smith. She asserts she knows how to negotiate it because she understands she's a comedian and you have to stay in the role that suits you best.
But she doesn't. Every time she's gotten into controversy that has brought criticism, like being rude to guests who don't share her politics, taking a stance for gun control on her old show, or her political debates on "The View," it has backfired on her. She withdraws from the public spotlight saying she has to get back to her family, but it's like politicians who say they want to spend more time with their family when they get into a jam.
O'Donnell hasn't yet acquired the very thick skin you need to be in the public eye and take political positions. You are immediately hated by half the people when you do and you have to accept that. Her biggest failing when debating with Elizabeth Hasselbeck on "The View" was she was determined to convert the woman. She could not let it go until Elizabeth gave up her own opinions, and people aren't going to do that. You put out your position; you let the other person put out theirs, and it stops there. Even the best preacher can't convert a sinner who doesn't want to come to Jesus. O'Donnell couldn't let it be over. She had to win, and when she couldn't, she quit. Back to the family.
So, be a comedian and don't do politics on TV, or be a political commentator and grow that thick skin. You will be called fat and ugly every day because that's how the Conservative Right fights. You have to deal with it.
And the other thing she needs to do is out her molester. In this book, she dances around it again, the man coming in the window. Her mother cutting the tree down, but that didn't stop "the man." Her mother telling her she's lying. The discovery that having a cast on your arm helps you fight better at night. The attempt to keep breaking her hand or arm after that so she'd still have the shield. And yet, she doesn't name the attacker or say anymore. She is still protecting him. Why? She is never going to be free of this and she's doing a disservice to all molested girls by not outing this man and making him pay.
That's why I think it's a family member, a brother or her father, and she's been silenced by the family because they have convinced her they all could not abide the truth coming out, that it would tear the family apart. That's always the molester's shield. Always. But she needs to do it anyway so this doesn't keep eating at her, because it is. It is the underlying theme on every page of every book she writes. She goes into great anguish about Barbara Walters betraying her, without making the connection it was ultimately her own mother that betrayed her, who did not protect her when she was alive, and then died and left her more vulnerable than ever. Everyone loses their mother, many of us when we're still children, but it doesn't become the huge loss O'Donnell perceives it to be unless there is another element, and in this case, the unspoken -and for Rosie, the unspeakable - betrayal. Which she has now hoisted onto Barbara Walter's substitute shoulders.
She needs to make two hard decisions and act upon them. Be a comedian or be political commentator, but not both, and take what comes, and out her molester, and take what comes. Both will set her free more than therapy or doing crafts.