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Six Degrees of Paris Hilton: Inside the Sex Tapes, Scandals, and Shakedowns of the New Hollywood |  | Author: Mark Ebner
Publisher: Simon Spotlight Entertainment
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $4.84
as of 2/10/2010 01:29 EST details
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Seller: lookatabook
Rating:  44 reviews
Sales Rank: 239088
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st Simon Spotlight Entertainment Hardcover Ed
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 1416959343
Dewey Decimal Number: 302.23086210979494
EAN: 9781416959342
ASIN: 1416959343
Publication Date: February 3, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| • | ISBN13: 9781416959342 | | • | Condition: USED - LIKE NEW | | • | Notes: |
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Product Description
In the burgeoning Hollywood club scene, where ecstasy dealers dine alongside celebrities, and illicit money bubbles up from below like the La Brea Tar Pits, a handsome double-murderer and ex-con of refined wit and taste charmed his way into young Hollywood's most elite social circles. Serving as their hired muscle and arbiter of street justice, he ultimately went on to expose their scandalous, hard-kept secrets -- all the while waging a criminal campaign against the ill-deserving rich and famous.Filled with sex, drugs, and sudden violence, Six Degrees of Paris Hilton: Inside the Sex Tapes, Scandals, and Shakedowns of the New Hollywood is the shocking true tale of Darnell Riley, a well-mannered middle-class kid from Los Angeles who reinvented himself as a stone-cold gangster in the boxing gyms and bruising streets of South Central, before serving seven years for a double homicide at fifteen. Released at age twenty-three, he infiltrated a far more decadent crowd whose privileged lifestyle is familiar to most only in weekly magazines. During his six-year stab at Hollywood, Darnell ran with its It girls and bully boys: He befriended Paris Hilton; was associated with multiple sex tapes; held Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis at gunpoint and humiliated him on camera; dated models; ran numbers; trafficked in drugs; carried out contract beatings; and "possibly" staged a daring series of home-invasion robberies, many of which were attributed to the infamous Bel-Air Burglar. In a potent real-life mix of Entourage and The Wire, award-winning journalist Mark Ebner follows Darnell's riveting story, from exclusive interviews conducted inside Corcoran State Prison, through the mean streets of Los Angeles, employing a Rogues Gallery of characters unrivaled in modern crime. The ultimate exposé of the greed, hypocrisy, and vulgarity behind Hollywood's new breed of feral rich and illicitly famous, Six Degrees of Paris Hilton is a front-row seat to the best show in town.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 44
 Misleading December 12, 2009
Angele Dawn Bissonette
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
The problem with this book is that it has very little to do with Paris Hilton.
Instead, it focusses on the sycophants which are forever found in the shadows and on the outer edges of great wealth.
Only a fool would take anything such people have to say at face value.
Some of them are outright criminals, many have highly questionable life styles, none appear to be upstanding citizens.
I cannot accept the testimony of any of these so-called witnesses.
Not only is this book highly misleading, it is also very badly written and lacks fluidity and cohesiveness.
In short, don't waste your money on this book.
If you really want to know about Paris Hilton, just follow her twitter.
You may find,as I did, that she is nothing like tabloids and explotative websites have portrayed her in the past.
 Wanted to Shower After Reading This Slime October 6, 2009
Frederick S. Goethel (Central Valley, CA)
I can take an occasional dose of tabloid material, and admit to occasionally buying a magazine at the check out stand of the local supermarket. Life isn't made up entirely of facts and education...entertainment has to enter somewhere. This book, however, is not that somewhere.
There are enough reviewers that have gone into great detail on the story line of the book, so I will spare you the details. I found I could read this for about 15 minutes before I either a) didn't care anymore or b) felt like I needed to shower to get rid of the filth.
For those into tabloid type material, this maybe a book of interest. If, however, you are inclined toward reading about people that are worth caring about, then this book is a waste. I gave it two stars only because the writing was decent.
 Six Degrees of Yawn August 27, 2009
John Williamson (Bucks County, PA USA)
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
Why did I bother with this? That's what I've been asking myself since I made it through the first fifty or sixty pages of Mark Ebner's Six Degrees of Paris Hilton: Inside the Sex Tapes, Scandals, and Shakedowns of the New Hollywood. Maybe it was to answer a morbid curiosity about Paris Hilton and/or books of this genre, but after reading it, I know that it's not a literary direction that I'll bother with again.
Author Ebner is someone with whom I'm familiar, since he's made his mark as a blogger, tabloid journalist and television clebrity of sorts. His style of writing can be entertaining is a simple fashion, and he is talented, but when one finishes a book such as this, it's like expecting a simple meal, only to find that one has devoured a full helping of cotton candy... in other words, it's not very nourishing.
Knowing the type of book that this was, I expected to at least be a bit titillated; that was not the case. I made it through the book (falling asleep in a few places), but in the end realized that the no-talent hotel heiress was about a boring as an airhead on a first date that one wishes could be taken home early. There are some points of interest reading about the Hollywood sleazeballs that make up the rest of this tale, but it does leave one feeling somewhat bored, to put it mildly.
I gained no knowlege from this book that I couldn't have picked from a number of television programs of from a tabloid that I might have scanned through in a slow grocery store checkout line. Yet I must admit that Ebner does write well enough to have kept me reading until the end.
I'll summarize it like this:
* Content: 1-star
* Writing: 4-stars
This book may appeal to some Paris Hilton and/or Hollywood sleaze fans, bit I've hopefully learned my lesson form this. Personally I found it to be a big yawn, but if you enjoy Entertainment Tonight on television or supermarket tabloids, then you might enjoy Mark Ebner's Six Degrees of Paris Hilton: Inside the Sex Tapes, Scandals, and Shakedowns of the New Hollywood... if you can stay awake.
I'll give it a yawning 3-stars in that case.
If you love TMZ, you'll love this book. If you have half a brain, steer clear. August 9, 2009
Tim Lieder (New York, NY)
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book starts off on a bad foot when the writer begins by saying that he's a recovering alcoholic and he loves the sleazy life even if he gets no joy out of the narcotics. After The Wordy Shipmates I am predisposed to dislike any non-fiction book where the narrator has decided to forget about the subject and just write his own memoir instead. While this guy isn't as obnoxious as Sarah Vowell, that's not saying much. He's also a little better looking that Moe from the Three Stooges.
It becomes nominally interesting when he talks about his time with the National Enquirer, but then he actually has to talk about his subject, Darnell, who is corresponding with him. At first, he talks about the background and how he got interested in the case and how he talked to Darnell. And like the Sarah Vowell book, at first you're fooled into thinking that he's just doing some throat clearing before he actually tells Darnell's story. And like Sarah Vowell, he can't be bothered to actually talk about the subject at hand without inserting his irritating and annoying self into every single paragraph. Yes, Hunter S. Thompson did it, but Hunter S. Thompson still managed to talk about the Hell's Angels or the Las Vegas experience. You read Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (Modern Library) and you get a decent picture of what the Hell's Angels are (were?) like and a compelling depiction of the casual violence and the tribalism.
With this idiot, you get nothing but his own need to validate himself. He's no longer writing for the National Enquirer but he's still writing Tabloid Journalism and so as he runs around fact checking and interviewing subject, he has to say who he interviews and why he interviews them and how long it takes to get ahold of them. ANd how much second hand information. Forget about taking yourself out of the narrative; this moron has to put himself front and center. He got ahold of Heavy D. He talked to some rich woman, etc., etc. He's so enamored with his hunt for the sources behind the stories told by Darnell, that he completely forgets to tell a compelling narrative which is SUPPOSED to be his job.
And what is left of this narrative when you ignore the asinine babbling of the writer? Not much at all. Darnell is a two bit punk and a con artist who got involved with some bad characters as a teenager, killed a couple of people in a diamond store robbery and got out. Once he got out he ended up in the same clubs as some people who knew Paris Hilton. He might have talked to Paris Hilton once or twice. She had his number when he stole her information. And then he molested Joe Francis and went back to jail.
But Darnell has a talent for lying and exaggerating his life. He writes a screenplay and claims that another screenwriter told him that it was disturbing and effecting. The writer gets ahold of that screenwriter and discovers that the screenwriter thought it was atrocious. He claims to sleep with a bunch of people that don't admit to knowing him. He robbed a bunch of homes. He turned on all his friends but claims that they turned on him. And there's supposedly ANOTHER videotape of Paris Hilton where she gets fingered in the back of a cab and says N----- at a church service. But the writer can't confirm it. In fact, the writer can't confirm most of the stories that Darnell gives him. In fact, most of them are outrighted contradicted. Because Darnell is a two bit liar who has nothing to do but tell stories.
To underline this fiasco, the writer claims that he broke down crying in the presence of Darnell because he really cares about the man and hopes that Darnell will get his life together. And then admires Darnell for being able to survive. And he wouldn't survive in Darnell's world. Blah blah blah.
This is a really terrible book about a bad writer trying to turn a nobody into a somebody and it wouldn't have been published if it weren't for the incessant (and false) name dropping.
 An entertaining read, if a bit slimy July 30, 2009
Dave (Indiana)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I did not read Hollywood Interrupted, so this was my first time with author Mark Ebner. Overall I came away entertained, which is really all I ask of a book with a title like this one has. The principal character is a thug who has been involved in a number of shady things, the stuff that a cynical observer would assume was a PR stunt orchestrated by a B-list celeb's agent. According to this author, those aren't PR stunts, they're just the slimy shenanigans of the book's star.
I should hold off on the slime references. While the subject matter certainly will make you want to take a long, long shower when you finish the book, the level of self-loathing this book generates is barely a shadow of what you'd get from, say, reading the Tucker Max book.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 44
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