From Publishers Weekly: Payne (former deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph) offers an erudite and vastly entertaining look at how the Western cultural obsession with and "shared human responses" to celebrity haven't really changed in the last few millennia. He finds analogies between the Trojan War and Nascar, St. Augustine's Confessions and Dollywood. Juxtaposing Britney Spears's shaving of her head with "tonsures of the past"--Anne-Josèphe Théroigne de Méricourt or Joan of Arc--and using Emile Durkheim to interpret her apparent irrational behavior reveals surprising conclusions: in that desperate moment, perhaps Spears was fumbling to communicate something to her ogling and voracious public. And here is the delightful paradox of Payne's thesis: in revisiting ancient sagas and modern sex tapes, analyzing Heath Ledger's death in the light of Goethe's Faust--he reveals more about us than any of our icons--past or present. He reveals our own prodigious appetite for erecting, cherishing, and destroying heroes, for casting out the deficient, for voyeurism as total knowledge and control. A charming, contrarian, and very witty look at how our stargazing can be "something that bonds us, and which expresses something about how our civilization works."
The Sunday Times review by Christopher Hart: Accounts of celebrities are usually either sneering or gushing — or both simultaneously, those attitudes being two sides of the same coin. Tom Payne’s wonderfully witty and erudite study of modern fame in the light of ancient myths and rituals is markedly kinder and more balanced, and yet also more unsettling. Drawing on tales of classical heroes such as Hercules and Achilles, as well as Jewish wedding customs, stories of human sacrifice in ancient Mexico and apposite quotes from Homer and Hesiod, Payne shows that the modern ascendancy of Jordan and Britney does not presage the end of civilisation. Celebrity worship, it turns out, is neither new nor lamentable. It bonds us together, and “expresses something about how our civilisation works”. Yet Fame paints a far more disturbing picture. It’s not that celebrity worship is dumb and trashy, but that it’s so manifestly a throwback to the cruellest forms of human behaviour and belief. By guiding us through the fate of some of their mythical predecessors — the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the martyrdom of St Perpetua, the execution of Marie Antoinette — Payne shows us how the lives of our modern chosen ones, both priviliged and anguished, provide us with an outlet for our most violent instincts, neuroses and jealousies.
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