The Mammoth Book of Hollywood Scandals (Mammoth Books 406)

This would have been better if there were more recent stories instead of so many taking place in the 20's and 30's. Also, there's way too much back story about the celebrities, just cut to the chase!

I got The Mammoth Book of Hollywood Scandals last week and have been forcing myself to finish it. That's generally a bad sign as I can get lost in a book quite easily.The idea behind this book is great; a collection of Hollywood scandals dating back to the early days and including contemporary scandals (though some of those incidents aren't terribly scandalous and qualify more as PR stunts). Some scandals are more well known than others and, being the gossip hound that I am, I truly love discovering "new" old scandalous stories. The author did what appears to be a decent job at researching these stories, but since there are no footnotes or a bibliography, that's just a guess on my part. The presentation is fairly clear: each chapter, which runs about four to five pages on average, details a scandal. The book contains no photos.While I am interested in the subject matter, the writing in this book is flat and amateurish which makes it a chore to finish. I have another book by Morgan,  Marilyn Monroe: Private and Confidential , and it suffers from the same thing. I ended up socking that book away because it was too boring to finish. I think Morgan has the makings of a good writer and she clearly has affection for the subjects she chooses, but her prose leaves a lot to be desired. As other reviewers have stated, there are some grammatical errors but I found the author's opinions injected into the text to be more annoying than any errors. She also has a tendency to prattle on. I found myself skipping some passages because it contained information that wasn't really relevant (or of interest) to the story.I would recommend this book to someone who is just becoming interested in old Hollywood scandals and gossip. There is a decent amount of information within the text that appears to be correct if you can get past the opinions and superlatives. If you're up on your Hollywood gossip and have other books that basically cover the same topic, you likely won't learn much more here.

I'm not even sure why I tired the Kindle sample of this book because I'm not really that interested in Hollywood, but it was more interesting than I expected. Most of the book (the first 75%) was about things that happened decades ago. That was the interesting part. The last part about things like Brad Pitt's marriage, etc. was not that interesting--at least to me. What I liked about the book was how it attempted to cut through rumors and gossip, and get to the truth. So, we learn things like how Fatty Arbuckle's career was ruined even though he was innocent of that murder charge. Sadly, there were a lot of stories about people who killed themselves when their fame faded. A lot of these stories were things I had heard about, but didn't know the real story. It would have been nice to have some pictures.

Unfortunately I can only give this book three stars and this is largely due to the way the chapters held way too many filling details. Filling details are what I use to put in a book to try and fool the reader into thinking they are important for the overall plot of the book but they most definitely are not!! This book also was largely made up about Hollywood stars that today's generation has absolutely no interest in and don't even know who the author is talking about. I thought the book was going to tell me interesting gossip about today's movie stars. My suggestion is to advise one to just pass on purchasing this book and use the money toward the hundreds of other gossip books for sale on this wonderful Amazon site!!!!

I enjoyed this book despite that, sadly, an editor wasn't paying attention. By the time I was less than one third through, I was driven to distraction by the overwhelming number of times the word "sadly" was used. Talk about overkill! "So-and-so climbed up to the fiftieth floor and sadly leapt to her death." "Mr. Movie Star shot himself in the head and sadly he died." "Sadly, the child was never found again." "Miss Film Star married sixty two times and sadly passed away in her sleep." Sadly, sadly, sadly, sadly. It got sooo tedious! Aside from the endlessly repeating "sadlys", the writing wasn't bad, and I enjoyed the book. Yeah, I'd still recommend it.

I honestly could have done without the first half of the book which was scandals of pre-talkie celebs that I had never even heard of and certainly was not interested in wasting my time to read about. Having said that, I did like each chapter being of one particular celeb and moving on to another. It did have some interesting info about the 'recent' well known celebs and their antics or scandals related to their demise. Would I recommend this book? hmmm ... perhaps only by starting with chapters 30-ish such as Clark Gable and moving forward to the present ones.

I love the way this book is formatted so, for those who aren't inclined to read such books cover to cover, it's easy to see which subjects are of particular interest to you so you can go right to that story. And there are so many stories here that are of interest to me. The author used her sleuthing skills to compile each original story, then all of its updates so she can tell you "the rest of the story." It saves you a lot of time to have all perspectives in the same place. It's a fascinating book that left me feeling that Hollywood is a place of heartbreak, betrayal, and misunderstandings. We folks who live in the real world, one that isn't dependent on illusion, are the lucky ones.

The chapters were often based on little known, or forgotten, Hollywood matters. There were a lot of events I had not heard about, so I found those fascinating. What annoyed me though, was the frequent use (or should I say, misuse) of the word- however. Sometimes it would be utilized twice (superfluously) in one sentence.Overall, ignoring the poor style of writing, I found the book informative and an interesting read.

I persevered with this to the end but a good deal of it is gratingly badly written. There are frequent examples of a similar sounding but entirely wrong word being used, once or twice entire sentences are complete gibberish. Also the recurrent use of the whole world 'knowing' or 'watching' something, nonsense, most of the world would have completely oblivious to the latest drink/drug/multi-marriage rampage of some Hollywood no note. Given that it was written in 2013 some of it is completely out of date, some 'happy endings' have since failed and in some cases people have since died.

Well-written and interesting, although I was less interested in the recent scandals - such as Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson, as they have already had a great deal of coverage in the media and indeed are still being written about. Also, some of the so-called scandals weren't scandals at all, but tragedies.

Although some of the latter chapters are a little out of date this book is an easy to read entertaining book

There are quite a few stories in this book that I've never even heard of and I'm a celebrity junkie. The stories are covered quite thoroughly without getting boring. Well worth the money.

This is a book that you can pick up, read a chapter or two and return when it suits. It is well researched and well written and gives a fascinating insight how some individuals blessed with fame can equally be damaged, or worse, by it. An easy four stars.