Further emissions from the Fame Formula juggernaut!

Reviews of The Fame Formula are still rolling in – here are a couple of good ones from the net.

Fame corrupts and corrodes, giving people a license to behave badly, writes Geordie Grieg in the Big Book review of The Fame Formula at The First Post website,

“Andy Warhol got it spot-on when he talked about everybody’s 15 minutes of fame. Not only about the desire for fame but its extreme brevity: on the whole fame fades frighteningly fast.

“Which makes fame, as seen through a provocative celebrity merchant’s tale about Hollywood’s manipulation of image and publicity, deliciously bittersweet. Never, according to Mark Borkowski, a publicist for 25 years, has so much effort been expended by so many hucksters for so little lasting reward.

“Fame, too, is only rarely global. Put Carol Vorderman in Vietnam and she is just an unknown British woman with a flashy smile. Put Jeremy Clarkson in Chicago and he is just a man in ill-fitting jeans. Put them both in Borough High Street and you will have a celebrity orgy. But put them both there in 10 years and no one under 25 will bat an eyelid towards them.

“Even the globally famous are ephemeral: 40 years ago John Wayne was more iconic then Brad Pitt is today. Nowadays he is an unknown name for most people under 30. In the 1940s, Johnny Weismuller – aka Tarzan – was the Beckhamesque model of the perfect male; now he’s reduced to being the answer to a question on TV quiz shows. Yet, as Mark Borkowski’s The Fame Formula tells us with insider’s relish and sly objectivity, publicists plan, lie, fabricate, manipulate and distort to get their clients written about…”

Click here to read more.

There’s also a short but enthusiastic review of the book on Mark Earls’ Herd blog – click here to read it.