Confessions of a Surrogate for Celebrities


Book Description

Confessions of a Surrogate for Celebrities is a Sizzling HOT tell-all from a former surrogate who secretly carried babies for some of the world's richest, most famous celebrities. Amidst great speculation about celebrities pretending to be pregnant, incidents with deflated "pregnant" bellies, and almost instantaneous body-back-after-baby results, Confessions of a Surrogate for Celebrities comes clean about which celebrities secretly hired surrogates to carry their babies, and lets the world in on the secret life of Celebrity Surrogates. Confessions of a Surrogate for Celebrities gives dynamite clues that help us answer the questions we all knew we had, and lets us speculate about which celebrities only pretended to be pregnant. Get ready for the shock of your life, and BEWARE, because this book will take down some pretty big celebrities and reveal their pregnancy lies and secrets!




The Star and Celebrity Confessional


Book Description

In this book the different manifestations, meanings, and processes of the star and celebrity confessional will be explored. The confessional is taken to be any moment in which a star, celebrity, or fan engages in revelatory acts that are considered to be authentic, heart-felt, and honest. These confessional encounters can take place in an interview, through performance and presentation events, online, and in ‘unscripted’ encounters. A star may break down in tears, or reveal a previously unknown truth about their private life. However, this authenticity is often found to have been manufactured, or is timed to occur against a new release or product launch. Alternatively, the desire to confess may be seen to draw attention to the centrality of pseudo forms of emotion in contemporary culture and the obsessional behaviour it produces. In this book authors consider acts of confession by celebrities such as Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson, Jade Goody, Britney Spears, Sarah Jessica Parker, Tracey Emin, and Russell Crowe.




The Baby Chase


Book Description

From the New York Times bestselling author of Crazy Love comes a riveting new narrative about surrogate pregnancy from both sides of the equation—the parents and the gestational carrier. Once considered a desperate, even morally suspect option, surrogacy is now sweeping headlines, transforming the lives of celebrity mothers and fathers like Sarah Jessica Parker, Nicole Kidman and Elton John, and changing the face of motherhood and the American family. But how much do we really know about it? And is it really as easy and accessible – emotionally, financially, legally and physically – as magazines make it out to be? We often hear about successful outcomes, but little about the journey – about the precious hope that starts it all, the ups and downs of finding a surrogate, the heartache and obstacles, the risks and expenses at every step, or the unbelievable joy when years of determination pay off. In The Baby Chase, acclaimed writer Leslie Morgan Steiner weaves three stories together — of a nurse, a firefighter, and the Indian gestational carriers and doctors who helped them — to provide one intensely personal look at what makes surrogacy so controversial, fascinating, and in some cases, the only ray of hope for today's infertile parents-to-be. Rhonda Wile and her husband Gerry struggled for years with infertility. With perseverance that shocked everyone around them, they tried every procedure and option available – unsuccessfully – until they finally decided to hire a surrogate. While surrogacy was being touted as a miracle for hopeful parents, for Rhonda and Gerry, it seemed an impossible and unaffordable dream. Until they came across the beaming smile of a beautiful Indian woman on the internet... and, within a few short months, embarked on a journey that would take them deep into the emerging world of Indian carriers, international medical tourism, and the global surrogacy community. Moving, page-turning, and meticulously researched, this complex human story is paired with an examination of the issues—religious, legal, medical and emotional—that shapes surrogacy as a solution both imperfect and life-changing.




Messy


Book Description

Sometimes life gets Messy. When sixteen-year-old Brooke Berlin catches a taste of fame and her movie-star father's attention, she decides it's time to take her career to the next level--by launching a blog that will position her as a Hollywood "It Girl" who tells it like it is. But between schoolwork, shopping, and spray-tan appointments, she hardly has the time to write it herself... Enter green-haired outsider Max McCormack, an aspiring author with a terrible after-school job pushing faux meat on the macrobiotic masses. Max loathes the celebrity scene almost as much as she dislikes Brooke, but wooed by an impressive salary, Max reluctantly agrees to play Brooke's ghost-blogger -- and the site takes off. How long will their lie last? Can the girls work together to stay on top, or will the truth come out and ruin everything they've built? Along with an entourage of fame-hungry starlets, scruffy rocker wannabes, and sushi-scarfing socialites, the case of Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan's dazzling debut, Spoiled, are back for another adventure in Tinseltown.




Understanding Celebrity


Book Description

`Graeme Turner is one of the leading figures in cultural studies today. When his gaze turns to celebrity, the result is a readable and compelling account of this most perplexing and infuriating of modern phenomena. Read on!' - Toby Miller, New York University We cannot escape celebrity culture: it is everywhere. So just what is the cultural function of celebrity? This is the first comprehensive overview of the production and consumption of celebrity from within cultural and media studies. The pervasive influence of contemporary celebrity, and the cultures it produces, has been widely noticed. Earlier studies, though, have tended to focus on the consumption of celebrity or on particular locations of celebrity - Hollywood, or the sports industries for instance. This book presents a broad survey across all media as well as a new synthesis of theoretical positions, that will be welcomed by all students of media and cultural studies. Among its attributes are the following: -It provides an overview and evaluation of the key debates surrounding the definition of celebrity, its history, and its social and cultural function -It examines the 'celebrity industries’: the PR and publicity structures that manufacture celebrity -It looks at the cultural processes through which celebrity is consumed -It draws examples from the full range of contemporary media - film, television, newspapers, magazines and the web




Secret Life of a Hollywood Sex & Love Addict


Book Description

What if you realize you're an addict and your drug of choice is MEN? After years of working as an image-obsessed actress in Hollywood, Roxanne finds herself at rock bottom from a disease that is anything but glamorous. In her first year of recovery, Roxanne has to take accountability for her past. From tales of being mistaken for a prostitute at the Hotel Bel-Air to botching a threesome attempt with an A-List celebrity, Roxanne shares how she faced the truth about herself and stopped playing the victim. Secret Life of a Hollywood Sex & Love Addict is a vulnerable, humorous, and sometimes outrageous look into the world of addiction. Roxanne's odyssey of using sex and love-as destructive and beguiling as an alcoholic reaching for a bottle-is a veritable rollercoaster of ups and downs, laughter and tears, and a true testament to facing your absolute truth and conquering your fears.So take a front-row seat into this complex world and learn the RULES that changed Roxanne's life, and if your lucky, maybe your own!




Consuming Religion


Book Description

Introduction: being consumed -- Practicing commodity. Binge religion: social life in extremity ; The spirit in the cubicle: a religious history of the American office -- Revising ritual. Ritualism revived: from scientia ritus to consumer rites ; Purifying America: rites of salvation in the soap campaign -- Imagining celebrity. Sacrificing Britney: celebrity and religion in America ; The celebrification of religion in the age of infotainment -- Valuing family. Religion and the authority in American parenting ; Kardashian nation: work in America's klan ; Rethinking corporate freedom -- Corporation as sect. On the origins of corporate culture ; Do not tamper with the clues: notes on Goldman Sachs -- Conclusion: family matters




The Sumerians


Book Description

The Sumerians, the pragmatic and gifted people who preceded the Semites in the land first known as Sumer and later as Babylonia, created what was probably the first high civilization in the history of man, spanning the fifth to the second millenniums B.C. This book is an unparalleled compendium of what is known about them. Professor Kramer communicates his enthusiasm for his subject as he outlines the history of the Sumerian civilization and describes their cities, religion, literature, education, scientific achievements, social structure, and psychology. Finally, he considers the legacy of Sumer to the ancient and modern world. "There are few scholars in the world qualified to write such a book, and certainly Kramer is one of them. . . . One of the most valuable features of this book is the quantity of texts and fragments which are published for the first time in a form available to the general reader. For the layman the book provides a readable and up-to-date introduction to a most fascinating culture. For the specialist it presents a synthesis with which he may not agree but from which he will nonetheless derive stimulation."—American Journal of Archaeology "An uncontested authority on the civilization of Sumer, Professor Kramer writes with grace and urbanity."—Library Journal




Mom in the Movies


Book Description

Turner Classic Movies and film historian Richard Corliss present Mom in the Movies: The Iconic Screen Mothers You Love (and a Few You Love to Hate), the definitive, fully illustrated book that shares the many ways Hollywood has celebrated, vilified and otherwise memorialized dear old Mom. With a foreword written by Debbie Reynolds and her daughter Carrie Fisher, and sidebar essays by Eva Marie Saint, Illeana Douglas, Jane Powell, Sam Robards, and Tippi Hedren, this book is packed with an incredible collection of photographs and film stills. Mom in the Movies makes a great gift for any mom—and for anyone with a mother who oughta be in pictures. Here, you will meet the Criminal Moms, like Shelley Winters in Bloody Mama, and the eccentric Showbiz Moms, including those from Gypsy and Postcards from the Edge. You’ll also find Great American Moms, as warm and nourishing as apple pie, in movies such as I Remember Mama and Places in the Heart, along with Surrogate Moms, like Ginger Rogers in Bachelor Mother, Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame, Dianne Wiest in Edward Scissorhands and Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side. And who can forget the baddest mothers of all? No book on movie moms would be complete without Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate. From the cozy All-American mom to the terrifying Mommie Dearest or the protective Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, when it comes to mothers on the silver screen, it takes all kinds. With Mom in the Movies, Richard Corliss and Turner Classic Movies bring those many moms vividly to life, in words and pictures.




Five Came Back


Book Description

Now a Netflix original documentary series, also written by Mark Harris: the extraordinary wartime experience of five of Hollywood's most important directors, all of whom put their stamp on World War II and were changed by it forever Here is the remarkable, untold story of how five major Hollywood directors—John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra—changed World War II, and how, in turn, the war changed them. In a move unheard of at the time, the U.S. government farmed out its war propaganda effort to Hollywood, allowing these directors the freedom to film in combat zones as never before. They were on the scene at almost every major moment of America’s war, shaping the public’s collective consciousness of what we’ve now come to call the good fight. The product of five years of scrupulous archival research, Five Came Back provides a revelatory new understanding of Hollywood’s role in the war through the life and work of these five men who chose to go, and who came back. “Five Came Back . . . is one of the great works of film history of the decade.” --Slate “A tough-minded, information-packed and irresistibly readable work of movie-minded cultural criticism. Like the best World War II films, it highlights marquee names in a familiar plot to explore some serious issues: the human cost of military service, the hypnotic power of cinema and the tension between artistic integrity and the exigencies of war.” --The New York Times




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