This is a great story of a strange man. Someone who got power, defined the celebrity personal interest story, exploited the influence he developed, thought he was God, and ruined his own life. It is especially compelling reading when it becomes clear that our fascination with famous people and their love lives and personal faults is really whipped up by these media people. It is also great when talking about Lucille Ball and how the public embraced her. When you see Winchell making the fateful mistake when siding with McCarthy, it seems like karma. This is a fantastic book.

Although most of us remember Walter Winchell fo rhis rapid-fire narration for the old "Untouchables" television show, he was much more than that. Neal Gabler chronicles Winchell's career and life, but it's his analysis of Winchell's affect on his times and culture that makes this book transcend routine biography. Winchell's became a powerful voice for a time: businessmen wanted to be his friend, celebrities needed him, and politicians feared him. In fact, most people feared him. But somehow, Winchell created a definition of celebrity that has endured even today. Although he may be forgetton in our conscious memories, Winchell still looms large in our cultural memory. This is a stunning biography of a man who fought hard to get it all and fought equally hard to keep his fame and recognition as lost it in a blaze of self-destructiveness. One of the best books I've read in years.

One has to admire Walter Winchell for he had it all: fame, power, money and beautiful women. Everything a man could want. And he had it for a long time (from the 1930s to the 1950s).

He also had an enormous ego which fostered many feuds with others he feared.

An outstanding book.

Remarkable and lamentable by what it manages to ignore this work
is more an example of what it tries to describe than an implement
for its understanting! That Gabler manages to write a book about
the spectacular engulfing of the everyday without engaging the
views of Guy Debord, Herbert Marcuse, Goddfrey Reggio, Georges Perec, Vince Packard or David Riesman is in itself a testemonial of how entertainment effectively compresses the depth of any analysis of its effects to a waffer thin prespective! What is advertised as revelatory soon is revealed as the author's emphatuation with his own subject. Wwept by the uncontainable wave of superficiality that he purports to denounce, Gabler is already a stand-in in the movie called Life, the delusion he
fully welcomes in his naive reconning...

This book is simply incredible. A more stimulating book I couldn't imagine! It's not that it told me so much I didn't know intuitively, but seeing it written so distinctly in black and white really hit home. This is one to read if you really want to get a sense of just how dramatically the world has changed. Neal Gabler, tells it like he sees it and has a lot of research to back up his views. I love that he doesn't make judgements or try to press an opinion on the reader. It's left up to you to decide how you feel about it all. I find myself thinking of points he brought up throught the day and seeing just what he meant by experiencing it in "real" life. The only reason I didn't give it a 5 is because I wish it was a bit MORE in-depth. It's so engaging that I can imagine an entire college course being made from this book. It is a book that's as entertaining as it is informative, and that's the whole point.

Neal Gabler merely scratches the surface as he describes the integration of media and entertainment into 20th Century culture, particularly 20th Century American culture. Gabler concedes at the outset that the book is diagnostic rather than prescriptive and he leaves few suggestions and little hope for a cure. The most disturbing part of the book is the final chapter, entitled The Mediated Self, in which he illustrates the degree to which many people have come to define their lives in terms of entertainment value.

Parts of the book are priceless. One should read it with a highlighter or a pencil and capture the more descriptive gems for future attribution. As an example, describing the propensity of '80's and '90's middle class Americans to videotape family events:

"Weddings, baby showers, bar mitzvahs . . . even surgeries, all of which had traditionally been undramatic, if occasionally unruly, affairs, were now frequently reconfigured as shows for the video camera complete with narratives and entertaining set pieces throughout. Sometimes a hastily edited version of the tape, complete with musical soundtrack and effects added to boost its entertainment value higher still, would be shown at the climax of the occasion as if the entire purpose of the celebration had really been to tape it."

One senses that Gabler, taking leads from Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Richard Schickel . . . even Andy Warhol, is on to something very big, if not overarching. Gabler deals with the subject in a mere 244 easily read pages, but I was left wanting more and feeling that the subject had been dealt with somewhat superficially. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone who can stand to add to their level of cynicism.

When Siskel and Ebert left PBS for greener pastures at Buena Vista in 1982 an equally competent and even brighter team of movie reviewers, Michael Medved and Neal Gabler replaced them. Unfortunately these replacements never achieved the soaring if ephemeral popularity of the originators of Sneak Previews.

All too soon Jeffrey Lyons replaced Neal Gabler before we got to know him. In 1988, Gabler's book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Created Hollywood, was published.

Here, the Golden Age of Hollywood is presented as an Age of Brass. We get to know on a first name basis the small group of Jewish immigrants, from the turn of the last Century rejected from mainstream American corporate business but with equally human hunger for comfort and wealth. They left their father's limited little businesses to jump on the Thomas Edison often-derided risky bandwagon of moving pictures and realized its true promise. They did this not out of the motive of a pioneer's dream of courageous exploration and but with the lust for gold of the Conquistadors.

Neal Gabler's book is a competent work. It offers an erudite tour through the various personalities in the early years and the reasons why this most unlikely group, using the most powerful and influential medium ever invented actually shaped the American Dream that we know today.

Insightful analysis of how the wide-open land of opportunity was not an ever-present American ideal but was in fact invented by those who most wanted it to be: poor, persecuted immigrants. Unlike the racist and elitist establishment cinema of the East Coast, Jewish Hollywood promoted recurring themes of equality of opportunity -- haunted by nightmares of persecution. The movie 'Hollywoodism' may be in some ways better than this book, because you can see the evidence for yourself. Nonetheless, recommended.

Gabler's An Empire of Their Own is an outstanding sociological, political, literary, and historical review of the important role mostly immigrant Jews played in the first few decades of Hollywood as the film capital. He doesn't pull punches, but gives findings that can be viewed as positive or negative--a welcome approach instead of a biased approach giving only one side. He shows the seven major producers (and many others in lesser detail) to be human beings, with strengths and weaknesses. The bigger picture, including an insight into the personal lives of the producers and how this affected their movies, is very good. He also does a good job of explaining how anti-Semitism played a real role in the lives of these Jewish producers, but how their personal styles also were sometimes not admirable. I have used the book in my Sociology Through Film: Jewish Images class, and rate it very good.