Top 10: Terrible Celebrity Books By
Ross Bonander Entertainment Correspondent -
Every other Wednesday 
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Terrible celebrity authors
Celebrity forays into publishing are driven by vanity and are typically
accompanied by raised eyebrows. Virtually all published celebrity
writers employ either a cowriter or a ghostwriter, and the rare few
that don't probably should. While critics tend to be ruthless,
publishers and the public readily devour these terrible celebrity books.
Legitimate authors, meanwhile, resent them, and it’s hard to find fault when you hear comments such as those made by
Madonna,
who claimed that she decided to write a children’s book because the
available books were, in her opinion, “vapid and vacant and empty.” For
good measure, she also added, “There’s like, no books about anything.”
With that in mind, enter a top 10 of terrible celebrity books. For
criteria, I eschewed autobiographies, memoirs and children’s books
(only a top 100 could handle those). Instead, I sought out disasters
across a diverse celebrity field.
Number 10 Swan - Naomi Campbell
Swan, the world’s top supermodel, has decided to abdicate her bitchy
crown of thorns and go in search of her successor. But Swan’s sister
mysteriously died many years ago (intriguing) and now she’s the
postmortem subject of blackmail (thrilling) and the whole thing is set
against the fast-paced, cutthroat, cosmopolitan world of haute couture
models (dynamite).
Campbell’s
openness about her use of a ghostwriter was probably a swan-dive taken
to separate herself from the book’s terrible reviews. Among the kinder
ones,
Library Journal told its readership -- mostly librarians seeking to fill their shelves -- that
Swan was “not an essential purchase.”
She has put out a couple of other books, but at least her publishing
career has been less glitzy than her career as a restaurateur with
fellow models
Elle MacPherson and
Claudia Schiffer was (you remember the Fashion Cafe -- the worst restaurant you never dined in).
Number 9 Roman Triptych - Pope John Paul II
Shortly before he died, the beloved Pope issued a volume of mostly
secular poetry. In it, he takes some time to muse on the standard
poetic topics; namely nature, mortality and the meaning of life.
Was it a sin for Catholics not to buy his book? Not officially, but it
wasn’t “official policy” for every Chinese citizen to buy a copy of
Mao’s
Little Red Book. That unofficial status didn’t stop the
Chairman from selling an estimated 900 million copies, placing him
second in all-time sales behind the Bible.
Dan Chiasson, writing for
Slate,
wasn’t terribly critical of the poetry, stating that it is “rather
good,” but wrote that the poems come across like “secular-didactic…
self-help literature” and that John Paul II seemed to have “a sense of
himself as rather exquisitely set apart from the world” in a pontifical
Morrissey kind of way.
Number 8 Angel - Katie Price (Jordan)
When dowdy, dumpy Angie turned 16, her parents dropped a bomb -- they
told her that she was adopted and her birth name was Angel. A year
later, Angel’s best friend gives her a makeover, which reveals that
she’s not so dowdy after all; in fact, she’s glamorous and beautiful.
This realization grants her some much-needed, if vacant, self-worth:
she follows it up with breast implants, drugs, and a love affair with a
“dangerous” member of a boy band. Pretty soon, Angel sluts herself out
to the world of the Page 3 glamour model.
Amazon.com’s reader
reviews gushed with praise for Jordan’s first work of idiot lit, which
apparently led her to task her ghostwriters to add a second novel and a
children’s book to her collection. More than a few reviews, however,
express disappointment that the supermodel-thin plot of
Angel so closely follows the author’s real-life antics as described in her two prior autobiographies.
Subject: Top 10 Terrible Celebrity Books 
Mon Jul 02, 2007 9:28 pm
