From Hollywood Boulevard, it’s The WOW Report for Radio Andy on SiriusXM! That’s right WOWers, World of Wonder Co-Founder Fenton Bailey, Executive VP of Development Tom Campbell, and WOW Report Editor James St. James have collaborated with reality TV guru and friend of WOW, Andy Cohen, on a weekly Top Ten Countdown of the things from the past week that make us go…WOW!
It’s a pop-culture obsessed hour complete with colorful diatribes, opposing opinions, and a dissection-like discussion that will make your drive home from work more fabulous!
You can now WATCH us recording the WOW Report in our gallery storefront on Hollywood Boulevard, just across the street from Hollywood’s oldest restaurant Musso & Frank! This week since Tom is out, Fenton & James – who have both written more than one book – invited four of our favorite WOWlebrity authors to join us! Jacquie Lawrence, Victor Corona, Josh Sabarra, and Abdi Nazemian are in the studio for our ‘Back to School Book Report’ edition of the Top Ten Things That Make Us Go WOW!
We air TODAY at 11AM EST (8AM PST) on the Radio Andy channel on SiriusXM, and again at 1PM EST (4PM PST). You can also catch the show on the SiriusXM app!
Let’s get started…
10) Different for Girls by Jacquie Lawrence
From Fenton’s review of Different for Girls:
A review of a Jackie Collins‘ novel once said it was “so hot it should be printed on asbestos”. The same goes for Different For Girls. Perfect summer beach reading, make sure you have quick access to the ocean – because in between chapters you will need to take a plunge to stop yourself bursting into flames. And it’s not just packed full of delirious unashamed and unabashed and ever-inventive sex, it also has a plot with fabulous twists and turns and cliffhangers aplenty – especially the end, that will leave you panting for the sequel! Jacquie used to work at World of Wonder, and headed up the development department in the UK where she unleashed on British viewers a string of saucy same-sex docs about the secret lives of lesbians that would make ‘The L Word’ blush.
Get Different for Girls by Jacquie Lawrence on Amazon
9) Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon by Wayne Koestenbaum
From Amazon:
Jackie Under My Skin is a passionate investigation of the ways Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis transformed America’s definition of celebrity, identity, and style. In a gallery of fantasies and tableaux, Wayne Koestenbaum explains the late first lady’s hold on Americans by examining the myths and metaphors that we’ve attached to her. An exuberant paean to a great star, Jackie Under My Skin is also a meditation on fame, mortality, and the difficulty of defining desire.
Get Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon by Wayne Koestenbaum on Amazon
8) Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner by Mark Ford
From Amazon:
Because Thomas Hardy is so closely associated with the rural Wessex of his novels, stories, and poems, it is easy to forget that he was, in his own words, half a Londoner. Focusing on the formative five years in his early twenties when Hardy lived in the city, but also on his subsequent movement back and forth between Dorset and the capital, Mark Ford shows that the Dorset-London axis is critical to an understanding of his identity as a man and his achievement as a writer.
Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner presents a detailed account of Hardy’s London experiences, from his arrival as a shy, impressionable youth, to his embrace of radical views, to his lionization by upper-class hostesses eager to fête the creator of Tess. Drawing on Hardy’s poems, letters, fiction, and autobiography, it offers a subtle, moving exploration of the author’s complex relationship with the metropolis and those he met or observed there: publishers, fellow authors, street-walkers, benighted lovers, and the aristocratic women who adored his writing but spurned his romantic advances.
The young Hardy’s oscillations between the routines and concerns of Dorset’s Higher Bockhampton and the excitements and dangers of London were crucial to his profound sense of being torn between mutually dependent but often mutually uncomprehending worlds. This fundamental self-division, Ford argues, can be traced not only in the poetry and fiction explicitly set in London but in novels as regionally circumscribed as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
Get Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner by Mark Ford on Amazon
7) Night Class: A Downtown Memoir by Victor Corona
From Barnes & Noble:
The playground of the rich and the beautiful, downtown New York’s nightlife spectacles and power of self-invention incubated pop icons from Andy Warhol to Lady Gaga. NYU sociologist Victor P. Corona sought a new education, where night classes held in galleries, nightclubs, bars, apartments, stoops, and all-night diners taught him about love, loss, and the living possibilities of identity. Transforming himself from dowdy professor to glitzy clubgoer, Victor immerses himself among downtown’s dazzling tribes of artists and performers hungry for fame.
Night Class: A Downtown Memoir investigates the glamour of New York nightlife. In interviews and outings with clubland revelers and influencers, including Party Monster and convicted killer Michael Alig, Night Class exposes downtown’s perilous trappings of drugs, ambition, and power. From closeted, undocumented Mexican boy to Ivy League graduate to nightlife writer, Corona shares in Night Class the thrill and tragedy of downtown and how dramatically identities can change.
Get Night Class: A Downtown Memoir by Victor P. Corona on Amazon
6) The Andy Warhol Diaries by Andy Warhol
From Amazon:
This international literary sensation turns the spotlight on one of the most influential and controversial figures in American culture. Filled with shocking observations about the lives, loves, and careers of the rich, famous, and fabulous, Warhol’s journal is endlessly fun and fascinating.
Spanning the mid-1970s until just a few days before his death in 1987, THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES is a compendium of the more than twenty thousand pages of the artist’s diary that he dictated daily to Pat Hackett. In it, Warhol gives us the ultimate backstage pass to practically everything that went on in the world-both high and low. He hangs out with “everybody”: Jackie O (“thinks she’s so grand she doesn’t even owe it to the public to have another great marriage to somebody big”), Yoko Ono (“We dialed F-U-C-K-Y-O-U and L-O-V-E-Y-O-U to see what happened, we had so much fun”), and “Princess Marina of, I guess, Greece,” along with art-world rock stars Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dali, and Keith Haring.
Warhol had something to say about everyone who crossed his path, whether it was Lou Reed or Liberace, Patti Smith or Diana Ross, Frank Sinatra or Michael Jackson. A true cultural artifact, THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES amounts to a portrait of an artist-and an era-unlike any other.
Get The Andy Warhol Diaries by Andy Warhol on Amazon
5) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noel Harari
From Amazon:
From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution – a number one international best seller – that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human”.
One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one – Homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?
Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago, with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.
Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because, over the last few decades, humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become?
This provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.
Get Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noel Harari on Amazon
4) Enemies Closer by Josh Sabarra
From Amazon:
Fortyish movie studio publicist Marcee Brookes feels ordinary; she’s stuck in a mid-level job, struggles to accept her size-16 figure and dreams of a man who might look past her waistline and into her heart. When Claire, the seemingly affable wife of screen legend Rox Madison, befriends her during a work project, Marcee’s life instantly turns from drab to dazzle. She zooms into the Los Angeles fast lane with Claire’s circle of glamorous pals who, until now, were merely faces on the pages of People magazine.
Marcee’s tight relationships with her sometimes overbearing mother, Rhonda, and her gay BFF, Jordan, provide a support system that helps her navigate her improbably fabulous new status and a potential romantic relationship with up-and-coming movie star Brent Wetherley. Their counsel becomes even more important as Marcee starts to see her fantasy life unravel and gets wise to the duplicitous nature of her “clique.” She quickly finds that all that glitters isn’t gold and that when Hollywood heavy-hitters give you a pat on the back, they’re looking only for a place to stick the knife.
Get Enemies Closer by Josh Sabarra on Amazon
3) Advanced Style by Ari Seth Cohen
From Amazon:
Advanced Style is Ari Seth Cohen’s blog-based ode to the confidence, beauty, and fashion that can only be achieved through the experience of a life lived glamorously. It is a collection of street fashion unlike any seen before—focused on the over-60 set in the world’s most stylish locales. The (mostly) ladies of Advanced Style are enjoying their later years with grace and panache, marching to the beat of their own drummer. These timeless images and words of wisdom provide fashion inspiration for all ages and prove that age is nothing but a state of mind.
Ari Seth Cohen started his blog inspired by his own grandmother’s unique personal style and his lifelong interest in the put-together fashion of vibrant seniors. Each of his subjects sparkles like a diamond after long years spent refining and perfecting their individual look and approach to life. The Advanced Style book will showcase, in luscious full-color, the best of the blog, but will also act as a true guidebook with all-new material featuring wardrobes, interviews, stories, and advice from a cadre of his most chic subjects, along with a large selection of never-before-seen photography—fresh off of sidewalk catwalks around the world!
Get Advanced Style by Ari Seth Cohen on Amazon
2) I’ll Take Manhattan by Judith Krantz
From Amazon:
Here is Judith Krantz’s greatest triumph–I’ll Take Manhattan. In the high-stakes world of magazine publishing, she weaves a dazzling tale of love and betrayal, and creates her most joyous character–sensational Maxi, an uninhibited woman who unexpectedly discovers that her talent for life is matched by a hunger to succeed.
Gorgeous, flamboyant Maxi Amberville is twenty-nine and has already discarded three husbands on two continents. Life is a stream of endless pleasure in her lavish Trump Tower apartment–until her widowed mother married a man who plots to sell her father’s magazine empire. And Maxi turns her incredible lust for living into a passionate quest for power.
Maxi takes over the small weekly Buttons And Bows. She gathers her hot-blooded ex-husband, sassy daughter and a coterie of the powerful elite. Then, risking all, Maxi creates B&B –the glitziest, ritziest, most successful fashion magazine in the country. Here is a dramatic, sizzling story of love, family, ambition and one unforgettable woman who gives life and love everything she has.
Get I’ll Take Manhattan by Judith Krantz on Amazon
1) The Authentics by Abdi Nazemian
From Amazon:
The Authentics is a fresh, funny, and insightful novel about culture, love, and family—the kind we are born into and the ones we create.
Daria Esfandyar is Iranian-American and proud of her heritage, unlike some of the “Nose Jobs” in the clique led by her former best friend, Heidi Javadi. Daria and her friends call themselves the Authentics, because they pride themselves on always keeping it real.
But in the course of researching a school project, Daria learns something shocking about her past, which launches her on a journey of self-discovery. It seems everyone is keeping secrets. And it’s getting harder to know who she even is any longer.
With infighting among the Authentics, her mother planning an over-the-top sweet sixteen party, and a romance that should be totally off limits, Daria doesn’t have time for this identity crisis. As everything in her life is spinning out of control—can she figure out how to stay true to herself?
Get The Authentics by Abdi Nazemian on Amazon
Listen in at 11AM EST (8AM PST) and again at 1PM EST (4PM PST) on SiriusXM! Or listen whenever you want on the SiriusXM App!
And be sure to give your ears the gift of THE WOW REPORT on Radio Andy SiriusXM EVERY Friday.
Do something this weekend that makes YOU go WOW!!!
