The Books Briefing: The Fault With Our Stars

Fame! To paraphrase David Bowie, it takes over culture and conversations in a way that can be hard to swallow. Back in 1962, the historian Daniel Boorstin worried that Americans’ obsession with celebrities and their manufactured personas was deteriorating the nation’s understanding of reality. His book about that phenomenon, The Image, now feels more prescient than ever. That’s not to say celebrity culture is fully detached from reality, though. As the scholar Renee Cramer argues, seemingly trivial speculation over stars’ pregnancies reflects