I kept getting random 'update' emails from a crazy Aunt for a while, I always assume everyone's got at least one nutty relative. If you don't, then you're probably the one. We call her the grim reaper because she usually only makes phonecalls when someone in the family has died. At the moment, Auntie has the family divided over an equally weird situation. I have a relative who "wrote" a controversial book and was just in the Enquirer for the second time. IT resurfaced on the news this week. Hard-hitting journalism at its finest.
Whoo hoo. I Googled and found the following, among other fodder:
A book 'review' of RUTHLESS
If you are laughing upon sight of this review of Ruthless: A Tell-All Book, I can say that I join you in your laughing. I’m going to be upfront and say that I’m no fan of Oprah Winfrey for many reasons. Yet, one would think that I’d be giving this trashy anti-Oprah book positive reviews then, right? First, a bit of background.
Keifer Bonvillain worked as an office manager at Harpo Studios when he decided to tape record Oprah and then write a tell-all book about it. I’m not going into the details as to what prompted him, since that’s not really that important, and if you really want to know you can buy the book yourself. But chances are after reading my review you won’t bother. The problem resides in so many discrepancies and so much he-said she-said gossip that one can only take this account as seriously as one does the National Enquirer. Much of the information the author provides, for example, is told second hand through a guy named "Todd." Some of the "juicy" tidbits revealed are as follows: Oprah is a racist, a lesbian, a liar, a greedy wench, and while all or none of this may be true, even if it were true, it’s not like one can trust that the author is telling the truth.
Just to give an example, Todd spends a good deal of time discussing the many ways in which Oprah is a racist, specifically how she chooses to discriminate against black males — either by portraying them as violent "wife beaters" in the films she’s been involved in or having hardly any black men on her staff — to having very few black male authors in her book club. In the film Their Eyes Were Watching God, for example, the actor who played Tea Cake was actually a light skinned black male, rather than the dark-skinned man Hurston describes in her novel. The author then believes this to be another piece of proof in the Oprah racist puzzle. Of course, any Oprah fan could undermine his claim by the mere mention that Oprah endorsed Barack Obama for President. In fact, there were many places online that were calling Oprah a racist, yet in the other direction - simply because she backed up Obama because he was black... So which is it?
It is impossible to take this book seriously, and it only succeeds in backfiring, giving Oprah fans more ammo in her defense. I would invite anyone to actually write a serious anti-Oprah book that discusses the hypocrisy she represents, from her silly endorsement of "The Secret" to the spoiled brat author Elizabeth Gilbert and her childish "advice" in Eat, Pray, Love, to Oprah’s endless preaching and fluffy interviewing style, to the "promotion" of Hallmark Card doggerelist Maya Angelou. (I was sickened when I happened to see when she had Sting on her show a few years back to discuss his memoir, and instead of asking the musician serious questions about his career, she asked what he and his wife did in bed together - had this been a man asking this of a woman, you can bet there’d be complaints, but coming from a woman it’s okay).
Anyway, so don’t bother with Oprah, or this book - that’s my advice. And before you go calling me "jealous" of her "success" I’d like to mention that at least I don’t exploit people on national television - and I also look better in jeans.
Wow, that's pretty accurate.... but how did he get his own Wikipedia page?
If you saw the piece of junk, you would realize how much of a farce this whole situation is. Our family was sent a copy of the ill-written crap and I couldn't get through it. There were misspellings and so many grammatical errors in it, it was hard to decipher. Then halfway through the book, the second section was bound together upside-down so you had to flip it in order to read it. The pages were numbered incorrectly and the typeset was off. It gave me a headache.
My cousin tried to bring down a woman who has more money tucked into her double chin than is contained in the entire economic standing in some countries, with a book that looked as if it was put together by chimps. Credit given where credit is due.
By the way, no one has seen or heard from him in months.
The family reunion next year is going to be a hoot.
