Grade: A- | Genre: Non-Fiction Summary: The Game is a great book. Guys will love to imagine unleashing their darker Casanova within. The ladies will find this strangely fascinating to see how easily these rather simple techniques can crack open an entire gender. Did you ever look at an odd couple and wonder how exactly that happened? Like the girl is hotter than Arizona asphalt in July, and he's not missed a DragonCon convention since he was wearing braces headgear. It a bizarre experience like someone just screwed Darwin. Money of course is a somewhat logical explanation. Inner beauty...uh no. The Game presents the only answer that makes any sense. It is a chaotic ride through the secret society of PUAs (Pickup Artists) that convince the finest women in this world to chunk all their defenses, obliterate their walls, and go home with guys they would have only let do their homework in high school. It's a rather unbelievable tale of one man's journey into this twisted realm of seduction. Every guy will be rapt in wonder thinking "does that really work," and every woman will be terrified at how easily they can be opened by a guy using a canned set of responses no different than a telemarketer.

The Game is the story of Neil Strauss or Style as he's known in the pick-up community. He's a rather average looking guy who writes for Rolling Stone and has ghost written biographies for Marilyn Manson and Jenna Jameson. Despite touring with debaucherous bands across the globe, he never got any action. He was always too shy and reserved, painfully intimidated by women. A year later, he was a master pick-up artist, able to have any woman he wanted in any way he wanted. He trained future PUAs in the black arts, and the gurus in the field were fighting over him more than the ladies. It all started when he swallowed his pride and plunked down $500 to attend a workshop. Mystery, his first guru that became his lifelong friend, took he and two other socially challenged gentlemen to the clubs and introduced them to the world of pick-up. It is a world with another language, gaudy wardrobes you couldn't fathom actually wearing, and hotter women than imagination could conjure, ready for the plucking. After a marathon weekend, Style absorbed Mystery's massive brain dump then set off to attend workshops from all the recognized gurus in the field. He learned Ross Jefferies' style of hypnotism, David DeAngelo's cocky funny technique, and Steve P.'s NLP among others to synthesize the jumbled body of knowledge into the ultimate pick-up machine -- Style. Very quickly he became a fixture in the community as gurus slugged it out to establish his allegiance to them and budding pick-up artists began emulating him like some Christ-like figure. His exploits are the things of Greek legends. He's picking up women who don't speak English; he's swiping celebrities' dates out from under their nose while they unknowingly assist him; he makes three-ways magically materialize; he's living in a posh mansion in the Hollywood Hills with an array of pick-up artists and Courtney Love.

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Celebrities are sprinkled throughout this book. Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dalene Kurtis, was one of Style's first number closes. Tom Cruise, the man whose pick-up guru Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia still marks the high point in his acting career, pops up often in Style's quest as a friend and mentor. Papa number closes Paris Hilton at the local taco stand. Style has Britney Spears thinking he's the best thing since sliced bread during an interview where initially she had already closed the book on him. Heidi Fleiss even shows up to go head-to-head with Style to see who could lasso more women. Style eventually surrenders the life of pick-up for Lisa Leveridge, Courtney Love's striking guitarist.

Strauss is a fantastic writer. His details are spot on, and he really makes you want to rifle through these pages to see what he and his cohorts are going to do next. I do need to mention that if you are looking at this as an instruction booklet to mine their methods on picking up women, you will be sorely disappointed. While some of their tools of course leak through, this is a book about this community and one man's radical transformation into a master pickup artist. If you are looking for a manual to establish your own "game", search out these colorful characters on the web, and you'll be flooded with books, workshops, and anything that will Hoover money out of your wallet. What you really discover from the Game is the key to all this mess is confidence, and someone who is completely secure within himself. Everything else simply comes down to the nefarious pursuit of using curiosity to build rapport then lowering a woman's self esteem so she will seek approval from you. In the end, though you may be able to open any woman in the world, you can't fake having a personality, which is a lesson all of the PUA's eventually learn.

This is a great book. Weighing in at close to 500 pages, I tore through this novel in three days. When you consider that I have 4 books on my nightstand that have all been "in progress" for the better part of a year, that is really saying something. Humorously, the book comes bound in a leather cover complete with a bookmark like the Bible. The ultimate little black book if you will. The ending is a bit anti-climatic after the non-stop blast of adrenalin that runs up to it, but this is real life after all, so you can't just script a cataclysmic exit. In such a lecherous space, Style comes off as a very upright guy that you'd want to hang out with. Perhaps it's the author's creative license, but his motives in picking up women seem beyond reproach. He never lies about his intentions, everyone he was with seems to regard him as a friend afterwards, and a good chunk of the women he's seeing know he's a pick-up artist. He's one of the few characters herein that has a personality and is moderately well adjusted. To most of them this is little more than a mechanical cycling of steps to check off to lead to a woman's bed. Guys will love to imagine unleashing their darker Casanova within. The ladies will find this strangely fascinating to see how easily these rather simple techniques can crack open an entire gender. If nothing else you may recognize the tools of the trade, putting that nagging question to rest concerning giving it up to that pimply geek that was so indescribably irresistible.