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In 1995 high-flying British journalist Toby Young left London for New York to become a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Other Brits had taken Manhattan - Alistair Cooke then, Anna Wintour now - so why couldn''t he? But things didn''t go quite according to plan. Within the space of two years he was fired from Vanity Fair, banned from the most fashionable bar in the city, and couldn''t get a date for love or money. Even the local AA group wanted nothing to do with him.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is Toby Young''s hilarious account of the five years he spent looking for love in all the wrong places and steadily working his way down the New York food chain, from glossy magazine editor to crash-test dummy for interactive sex toys. But it''s more than "the longest self-deprecating joke since the complete works of Woody Allen" (Sunday Times); it''s also a seditious attack on the culture of celebrity from inside the belly of the beast. And there''s even a happy ending as Toby Young marries - "for proper non-cynical reasons," as he puts it - the woman of his dreams. "Some people are lucky enough to stumble across the right path straight away; most of us only discover what the right one is by going down the wrong one first."

British journalist Toby Young should have been the best person to read his own gossipy, occasionally bitter, but mostly hilarious memoir of his time at Vanity Fair. Given the personal nature of the book--he hobnobbed with movie stars, screwed up assignments, fell in love, and generally drank too much--and his melodious BBC delivery, this production should have worked. But Young shows poor judgment by ascribing grating voices to every character. He does a passable American accent, but everyone is improbably gruff, whining, or buffoonish--even the celebrities, whom he is utterly unable to imitate. This is still a funny work, but a straight-up delivery would have allowed listeners to laugh without cringing. D.B. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine

 

Toby Young was born in 1963. In the course of his career as a journalist he has been fired from a succession of prestigious newspapers and magazines, including the Times of London, the Guardian, the Independent, and Vanity Fair. He lives in London.