Fame: What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity

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." (Nov.)