A vigorous, sometimes predictable defense for reality TV that could use more of the genre’s surprises.
For reality TV fans looking for high-minded, scholarly reasons to defend what many consider “guilty pleasure” viewing, here is a book filled with them.
Lindemann, an associate professor of sociology at Lehigh University, crafts a thorough, well-plotted argument that shows how MTV’s Real World franchise, reality competitions like the Survivor series, and the universe of Real Housewives stars both influence popular culture and are shaped by it. Though the narrative is constructed like a doctoral thesis—the first half moves from an examination of reality TV’s impact on the self, couples, groups, and families to tackling big issues like race, gender, and sexuality in the second half—the author drops in enough quirky tidbits about Cardi B or various Kardashians, especially at the beginning, to keep things moving. She walks the line between entertaining and educational as she discusses how unscripted TV is “a fun-house mirror of our dominant, heteronormative culture, and even as it deals in sexual archetypes, the genre also shows us some possibilities for transcending our deeply entrenched roles and expectations.” But given the ever growing cavalcade of fascinating personalities to write about—e.g., the megarich Kardashian and Jenner families, battling Real Housewives, and groundbreaking activists like Pedro from The Real World: San Francisco—Lindemann’s discourse usually ends up toward the academic side. “We’ve seen how it has popped from its documentary roots,” she writes, “thrusting zanier and zanier cast members into increasingly convoluted and provocative scenarios.” However, we see little of that zaniness or the escapist interest that attract people to the format in the first place. When the author does indulge—as she does with a fascinating look at how “real” “Countess” LuAnn de Lesseps is on the Real Housewives of New York City—it just makes you want more.
A vigorous, sometimes predictable defense for reality TV that could use more of the genre’s surprises.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-27902-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A brash entrepreneurial memoir driven by ambition and resilience if sometimes sidetracked by repeated score-settling.
The controversial Barstool Sports founder speaks his mind.
Love him or loathe him, Barstool Sports founder Portnoy has built one of the most influential—and polarizing—sports media brands of the digital age. Readers will likely approach his memoir with opinions already firmly in place. Fans will relish his blunt unapologetic voice; detractors may at least come away respecting the relentless drive behind his success. Although framed around Portnoy’s many public controversies, ultimately, this is less a grievance narrative than an entrepreneurial memoir in which nearly every business triumph is accompanied by another public feud that only amplifies his brand. He casts himself as perpetually at war with journalists, business rivals, and critics determined to cancel him. His fiercest attacks are reserved for agents and reporters. The strongest chapters chronicle Barstool’s unlikely beginnings as a free, Boston sports-gambling newspaper he launched in 2003. Beneath his swagger, Portnoy delivers a surprisingly grounded, even inspiring, account of building a business from scratch: cold-calling advertisers before the paper existed, writing nearly every article himself, delivering copies throughout Boston, inventing marketing schemes on the fly, and refusing to quit despite repeated setbacks. He vividly captures the obsessive work ethic and improvisational instincts that transformed a one-man operation into a multimedia empire spanning sports media, gambling, podcasts, merchandising, and internet personalities. Portnoy’s guiding principle is simple: trust in his instincts, no matter the backlash. That certainty fuels both his greatest successes and his most divisive moments, including his unwavering political opinions and repeated clashes with the press. Refreshingly free of the ghostwritten slickness that flattens so many celebrity memoirs, he proves a natural storyteller. His prose is unfiltered, profane, combative, and consistently entertaining. Even readers at odds with his worldview may better appreciate how the same unshakable convictions that repeatedly landed him in controversy also powered Barstool’s remarkable rise.
A brash entrepreneurial memoir driven by ambition and resilience if sometimes sidetracked by repeated score-settling.Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9781668222027
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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