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Author: Kyle Smith

Date: 22 July 2002

Toby Young swanned into celebrity-choked parties (and was thrown out of them), met beautiful women (who rejected him) and made glamorous friends (who stopped returning his calls). In short, he was the toast of the town: burnt toast, falling to the floor butter side down. He laughs about it all in this memoir of failiure, and you will too.

An English journalist living in Manhattan and working at Vanity Fair, Young arrived "wanting to be Cary Grant and ended up as Ralph Bellamy." Low jinks like hiring a stripper at the office on Take Our Daughters To Work Day and drinking like a fish - like a school of fish, like a university of fish - lead to salary reviews (from $10,000 a month to £1,000) and a pink slip. Young is a self-deprecating Tom Wolfe, with a satirical eye for "limo pimps," "Starbucks bohemians" and Coney Island's "atmosphere of almost nuclear desolation." Helpful tips abound. How to crash an Oscar party? Bring a pig on a leash and tell everyone it's the star of Babe.

(Da Capo, $24)

Bottom Line: Hilarious lifestyles of the rich and shameless