Product Description

Bushnell, a columnist and social critic, trips on her Manolo Blahnik kitten heels on a drunken cocktail trail through New York, from the Baby Doll Lounge to the Bowery Bar. On her travels, she assembles a cast of freaks, wonders, wannabes and gossip-peddlars.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7538 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.com Review
The "Sex and the City" columnist for the New York Observer documents the social scene of modern-day Manhattan. The reader gets an introduction to "Modelizers," the men who only have eyes for models, as well as a more common species, the "Toxic Bachelor." Reading like a society novel gone downtown and askew, Sex and the City is a comically sordid look at status and ambition and the many characters consumed by the sexual politics of the '90s.

From Publishers Weekly
"We're leading sensory saturated lives," announces jetsetting photographer and playboy Peter Beard in a roundtable discussion of menages a trois, setting the tone of opulent debasement that suffuses this collection of Bushnell's punchy, archly knowing and sharply observed sex columns from the New York Observer. Prowling the modish clubs, party circuit and weekend getaways of rich and trendy New York society (most of whose denizens are identified by pseudonyms), Bushnell offers a brash, radically unromantic perspective. She visits a sex club and dates a Bicycle Boy ("the literary romantic subspecies" whose patron saints are George Plimpton and Murray Kempton). But in most chapters she keeps to the sidelines, deploying instead her alter-ego Carrie (like the author, a blonde writer from Connecticut in her mid-30s), whose sweet if feckless romance with Mr. Big?a nondescript power player?serves as a foil for the hilarious, unsentimentalized misadventures of her peers. These include model-chasers like Barkley, 25, a painter with the face of a Botticelli angel whose parents pay for his SoHo junior loft, and Tom Peri, the "emotional Mayflower," who ferries newly dumped women to higher emotional ground and is then invariably dumped. The effect is that of an Armistead Maupin-like canvas tinged with a liberal smattering of Judith Krantz. Collected in one volume, Bushnell's characters grow generic, but in small doses these essays are brain candy that will appeal equally to urban romantics and anti-romantics.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Bushnell extracts some gems from her "Sex and the City" column in the New York Observer, which has a devoted following. But will it play in Peoria?
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Just not very good
No plot, weak characters, pointless lives... this book just left a bad taste in my mouth. Random chapters about interviews with perverts interspersed with little tidbits about Carrie and Mr. Big. Who cares? I certainly don't. Bushnell's other books are so much better! Skip it!

extremely disaponted
I was very disaponted with the book. It seemed like the characters were hopping around so much that I couldnt figure out what was going on. I love the movie and I own every season, the book was just disapointing.

A Different Sex and the City
The Truth: I'm a Girl, I'm Smart and I Know EverythingAs a positive psychologist and the author of four books for women and girls, the latest is a quick fiction read,designed to build self-esteem, The Truth (I'm a girl, I'm smart and I know everything), I am always eager to see how women are portrayed and what lessons we can learn from a story in terms of female development. Yes, I am addicted to the series, Sex and the City. I never saw it when it ran, but now can hardly fall asleep without a rerun. Give me any of the girls and I'm happy. Give me all four together, chatting over lunch or breakfast, and I'm even happier. As a psychologist I see the brillance of the series tied into the intimacy that the women achieve with each other. It is this intimacy that helps them through love disappointments, career mistakes, loss of family, etc. However, although I enjoyed the book very much, I missed this level of female closeness in the book. I was surprised and fascinated at the same time. The characters I could see being birthed in the book, but the community they created with each other I guess had to wait until the book was rewritten into a screen play. I wonder if Candane Bushnell was pleased with the next step into the closeness that women can achieve with each other that the series and the movies has taken on.

In terms of my work with girls and women, it is this closeness that is so important developmentally. We need the time of endless dialogue and anaylsis that Carrie, Charlotte, and all had day after day. Men don't need it, but we do.

Still, Sex and the City is a great read. I recommend it and you will, like myself, be intrigued to see how the four women came into being. You will laugh and be dismayed and it won't change one way or another your eagerness for the next re-run of Sex and the City. At least it didn't change my late night run to the television!