Too Famous

The Rich, the Powerful, the Wishful, the Notorious, the Damned

By: Michael Wolff

Narrated by: Holter Graham

This program includes an introduction read by the author.

If you can judge an audiobook by its enemies, Too Famous could be an instant classic.

Best-selling author of Fire and Fury and chronicler of the Trump White House Michael Wolff dissects more of the major monsters, media whores, and vainglorious figures of our time. His scalpel opens their lives, careers, and always equivocal endgames with the same vividness and wit he brought to his disemboweling of the former president. These brilliant and biting profiles form a mesmerizing portrait of the hubris, overreach, and nearly inevitable self-destruction of some of the most famous faces from the Clinton era through the Trump years. When the mighty fall, they do it with drama and with a dust cloud of gossip.

This collection pulls from new and unpublished work —recent reporting about Tucker Carlson, Jared Kushner, Harvey Weinstein, Ronan Farrow, and Jeffrey Epstein — and 20 years of coverage of the most notable egomaniacs of the time — among them, Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, Rudy Giuliani, Arianna Huffington, Roger Ailes, Boris Johnson, and Rupert Murdoch — creating a lasting statement on the corrosive influence of fame. Ultimately, this is an examination of how the quest for fame, notoriety, and power became the driving force of culture and politics, the drug that alters all public personalities. And how their need, their desperation, and their ruthlessness became the toxic grease that keeps the world spinning.

You know the people here by name and reputation, but it’s guaranteed that after this audiobook you will never see them the same way again or fail to recognize the scorched earth the famous leave behind them.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company

©2021 Michael Wolff (P)2021 Macmillan Audio

Thoroughly enjoyable

…even—especially—the chapter on Jeffrey Epstein. The chapters on Andrew Cuomo were an interesting time capsule. The chapters on Trump, Bannon, and Kushner were rehashes of materials in other Wolff books, but even those were fun to listen to.

Quite Interesting

I think Michael Wolf books are quite interesting, this book is no exception. Last chapter is about Epstein. I think a lot of what he writes about in that chapter is fairly new or certainly little know

NOT my favorite Michael Wolff book

I bought this because I throughly enjoyed Michael Wolff's earlier books. This was my least favorite... mostly because I don't care about most of the people he chronicles here.

You need a certain worldview and vocabulary to get this.

I absolutely guarantee that those who liked this book like it even more when they see the people who do not like it. Firstly, the understanding that this is a collection of articles in essays and not a chronological historical text is missed by the less sophisticated. Secondly, It’s written by a Vanity Fair columnist who lives in Greenwich Village with impeccable style and cafe society bona fides. A high opinion of himself is the price of admission and we would have one to, if we got to sit in the rooms he gets to grace.

I really want to see a review of somebody who actually understands this book who doesn’t like it. There are none here.

A remarkable and delicious history

This collection is a remarkable portrait of the last 25 years. Even though the articles were written over that wide range of time, Wolff’s theme is precisely rendered: in the globalized vortex of media, celebrity, money, and politics, everything and everyone has become obsessed with notoriety, and this compulsion is choking us just as surely as the rope around Jeffrey Epstein’s neck.

Trash

Don’t wast your money. This book is nothing more than the rantings of an author who is way to impressed with himself.

Very hard to listen to

The audio is painfully slow and monotone The author used old, tired cliches and boring comparisons in his condescending opinions of his subjects.
I was hoping for much more

Tried to like it. Save your credit.

Nothing new here. Old gossip and who cares? I had to return for credit. Too bad.

Uninteresting Gossip About Has Beens

Do Not Buy This Book. I couldn’t make it past the first three or four chapters. It appears to be a compilation of articles Wolff wrote sometimes in the past, often the distant past. There are no dates so when he says things “like last fall” you have to google when a book or event occurred, only to realize it was 2001 or 2006. You could say “old news” but there’s nothing resembling news in the book. It’s mostly about people the author disdains. Ergo, the title that they are inexplicably (in his view) “too famous.” If they are as dull as he portrays them to be, I have to agree. At bottom, it’s a superficial book about insiders in the media business by an insider in the media business for insiders in the media business. It’s biggest sin, however, is that it’s boring. Wolff can write. But reading a compilation of articles in late 2023 about events in 2001 or 2006 in a book published in 2021 about famous but uninteresting people made this reader as “why?” Finding no good answer, I stopped in the middle of the fourth chapter and urge you not to begin.

Almost Unlistenable

While the narrator is dull and listless, it’s really this book that takes the cake. Wolff goes on and on about how terrible the people he writes about are. Neglecting the fact that without them, he would have no one to write about. About half way though this title began to sound live the teacher from the Peanuts animated cartoon. I could take no more!