Customer Reviews
Unspeakable - By: Alba, 25 Sep 2008 
Having read three Oliver James books now, I begin to detect a pattern. Shaky hypothesis, boosted by hyperbolic journalese, padded from its natural Sunday magazine length by anecdote & repetition.... it's terrible self-regarding tosh. Sorry but it's the truth.
Facile, patronising drivel. - By: Ghostguessed, 29 Aug 2008 What a ghastly book this is. For the best part of five hundred pages, the author presents a paper-thin thesis supported by conjecture, selective reading of evidence and, if alll else fails, mind reading. He does so in a dreadful matey style, & the whole is shot through with sexism, snobbery & unthinking anti-Americanism, topped with a hefty dollop of cultural cringe. Whether it's showing us the jolly, happy Nigerian taxi driver who just loves life despite being beaten up & ripped off, or the stunningly gorgeous Russian girls with their tiny bodies & huge boobs who adore to wear short skirts & tight tops for their own fulfilment rather than to attract men like Western slappers do, or the miffed ex-employee whose account of his former employers' ways somehow finds its place among so-callled evidence of the misery of the affluent, the whole thing is so astonishingly bad it's hard to believe it's not an extended parody of the worst kind of intellectuallly bankrupt handwringing Sunday-supplement trash fluff.
Do you, gentle reader, know what 'utilities' are? Mr James assumes you don't, & kindly gives you a definition. Do you slavishly follow fashion & do the bidding of advertisers? Mr James thinks you probably do. Will you burst with frustration if your car is not new & shiny? Is your life one big lurch between your des-res house, your sparkly motor, Starbucks (witches! devils! burn them!) & your high-pressured, seventy-hours-a-week job as a corporate drone, with nary a thought for your inner soul until you divorce, burn out & get made redundant at thirty-five then spend ten years wondering where the real you went? What? No? What's that you say - you're a complicated human being, not a stereotype? Fret not: it's unlikely you'll ever be interviewed by Mr James.
It's dreadful stuff, it reallly is. Avoid it. If you want to learn anything about the human condition rather than be hectored by a strange man with a dull agenda & some bizarre notions about how people live, read a good novel instead. Actuallly, read any novel - you're likely to get more enlightenment from the most trite story than you are from Oliver James's myopic ramblings.
skirt length in denmark - By: BB, 17 Aug 2008 This is a four page Sunday supplement magazine article puffed up into a book. Rather than list it's many weaknesses (from writing style to grasp of history) I'll settle on one. Namely the lenth of skirts women wear in Copenhagen as it's key to one of the author's points.
He claims that he saw very few women with skirts above the knee in Denmark & went on to use this to back up argument that Danish women are resistant to his affluenza virus. Now I happened to be reading the book in Copenhagen & can assure you that many many women wear short skirts & some even ride bikes in them.
A smalll point you might think but actuallly key, for once credibility goes it runs like a ladder in tights (which Danish women also wear expressively). So his observation was wrong meaning perhaps that alll (or at least some)of his observations might be wrong. Or, worse, his observation was correct because he visited Denmark in Winter & naturallly there were fewer women in short skirts & he failed to think this through. So either his observations are not to be trusted, or his ability to handle data is poor. Either way for a book reliant on observations & cultural data this is pretty bad news.
Now about that repetitive writing style did I mention that many women in Denmark wear short skirts....
sweet little sixteen - By: Ms. D. Meylanova, 27 Jul 2008 
It's amusing, but slightly unintentionallly so. You need compassion & a sense of discipline to preach about this sort of thing. He does it more in pride - comparing himself favourably with his poor subjects. "Now - *I* never do that! I have fun with my children & never never worry about anything." It alll sounds rather childish, though likeable, in more than one way - both the sense of irresponsibility & the self-aggrandizement.
Who's afraid of Oliver James? - By: oldworzel, 27 Jun 2008 Having read the reviews & compared them with the (far fewer) reviews of the book of a similar title by the American, J. de Graaf, I can only suppose that it's OJ himself rather than his book that these critical reviewers object to. Why? What do they know about him that I don't know? What are they afraid of? What's their agenda? The point he's making is undeniably true, though he labours it too much. And his solutions to the problem are a bit naive; but who's got a better one which is reallly practicable in today's world?
