Book Review: A Massive Swelling by Cintra Wilson

In this collection of her essays and columns, Cintra Wilson has produced a blistering, hot attack on our celebrity culture.

The line between criticisms and attacks is a blurry one as Wilson often demonstrates. Upon reading some of her columns one tends to smile and nod while with others force a grimace as she goes too far.

The following two excerpts are good examples:

“Streisand is an incredible sacred cow, capable of pulling indefatigable style boners year after year without losing a millisecond of love from the world armies of not-just-homosexual fans she has racked up over the years. Why? She’s Barbra, and she is the prototype for that rare breed of totally irony-free diva, women who are so shimmeringly dead serious about the importance of their talent that they need to keep enlarging themselves with white weddings and entire clothing lines and personal scents named after themselves, every few years.”

Regarding the Oscars:

“Many stars are obviously fucked-up on something. You can’t tell who might be humming with stimulants because they could just be aggressively facelifted into a constant look of surprise, like Cher. George Lucas always seems moodily drunk, and looks like an enormous pink brain coral. De Niro might have been squiffy when he got that haircut that made him look like a fat, mean pineapple.”

The book is subtitled Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Social Diseases and that’s a good description as she looks at not just celebrities and celebrity worship but also at deeper questions such as the wisdom and meaning of the push for more and more plastic surgery.

She gives a clear description of her goal:

“As far as this book goes towards being a method of helping the world instead of hindering it further, I can only state that here you will find, for the most part, feverishly lambasting criticism of our moronic culture today, which can act as a kind of stringently abrasive cleanser on your soul if you really have an open mind about it.”

In pursuit of her goal she succeeds, for example, by taking on the Academy Awards for being so stupid.

[ADBLOCKHERE]At times her writing is touching. At other times, she is more like a pit bull – attacking almost for the sake of attacking.

If you want to read a book that takes down such celebrities as Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson and Celine Dion, then this is the book for you.

Just be warned that sometimes she comes off as a wise woman who needs to stop being such a smartass. I make that comment as a smartass myself who knows there is such a thing as going too far in an attack piece.