dont know wether this is from our steve jansen but found this by amazon.Customer Review
13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
Humility to follow?, 26 Dec 2007
By Mr. Steve Jansen
I thought Booky Wook started promisingly enough, and I was prepared to reassess him. But by mid-point I began to tire of Brand's self-indulgence; and by the end, I was well and truly sick of the guy's self-importance and indulged skew on life. So much so, that the scales of his celebrity removed themselves, leaving the adolescent rantings of a prose-stuffed student, who mistakes chemical stimulation and anti-social selfish behaviour for truth, enlightenment and (sigh...) rebellion.
Whilst the man is indeed in possession of talent, should be rewarded for writing his own autobiography in these ghost-written times; and is sharply amusing in much of his self-deprecation, there's still enough of his post-addiction self-obsession on tap to ensure he keeps trying for the cake whilst also scoffing huge chunks. I so much wanted him to drop the act and get humble, and that desire kept me reading; but it never comes, and the Brand of rock and roll humour eventually wanes.
Unless you didn't know (or had failed to grasp the appeal of his USP) Brand almost killed himself becoming addicted to drugs'n'booze'n'sex whilst looking for proof that he was a golden (intellectual) child who'd criminally remained misunderstood by the rest of the world; and he alienated just about everyone as he behaved so horrendously with friends, relatives, work colleagues and as many women and prostitutes he could lay his dirty sticky fingers on.
However, now that he's clean, the only difference seems to be that he's swapped the safety harness of self-induced numbness - the one that stopped him from seeing the errors of his own ways - for the protection of celebrity and riches, and the bulletproof delusion he clings to concerning the myth of the troubled artist.
Brand's hero, Morrissey, might have elevated the aesthetics and deprivation of poverty into the eyeline of so many of us 70s children - but at the end of the day, Mozza lives in a mansion in LA. Brand on the other hand continues to slag off the shallow, hollow rattle of our popular culture, yet makes shed loads of cash off trash like Big Brother; yearns for spiritual salvation for us all, yet earns his money swearing and running off his potty mouth on telly, like it's cool and edgy.
Brand's inner life is a real shame... in so many ways.