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 Awesome! Aug 24, 2010
This book was well worth the money. It is beautifully written that keeps you interested and slightly giddy. It's an amazing book that can help you become the thing every afc has ever wanted to be a pua.
 Too weird Aug 16, 2010
I don't like this book; it's too strange. If you are looking for a "how to" book, "Secrets of the A Game: How to Meet and Attract Women Anywhere, Anyplace, Anytime" is much better.
 Well Written, Entertaining, a Pickup The-Easy-Way Aug 12, 2010
If you're not familiar with The-Easy-Way books, they are an educational series that turns any body of knowledge into a story for edutainment purposes. That's what this is. It's not a manual. If you pick it up as a manual, you are wasting your time. It is an entertaining experience with many scattered tidbits of advice that changes your perspective enough to make a difference in the Pickup world.
Without revealing the plot or turning this into an essay, you can expect a very deep encounter with human nature from both collective and female perspectives. The narrative ease is dazzling, shuffling from first person to dialog to stories. Without a doubt there is no substitute for a talented writer who has transformed himself by visiting the outer limits of human psychology to undisputably dominate the battlefield.
Not a How-To book, but a great, entertaining read Aug 06, 2010
There's a good chance I wouldn't have believed some of the extreme claims made in this book if I hadn't seen VH1's reality show, The Pickup Artist, first. Whether you believe it or not, Neil Strauss' The Game is a fun and hilarious book that will suck you in and keep you reading until you hit the back cover.
The gist of the book is as follows: Neil Strauss is asked by an editor to investigate the underground PUA (pick-up artist) community. Like most people, Strauss doubted that he would find anything legitimate, but decided to look into the assignment, partly out of self-interest. After learning some PUA techniques from Mystery, creator of the Mystery Method of seduction and perhaps the greatest PUA, and finding some success, Strauss takes on the alias "Style" and totally immerses himself in the lifestyle. Style uses the skills honed by years of writing and journalism to study the many schools of seduction and eventually emerges as one of the world's greatest pick-up artists, rivaling and perhaps even surpassing Mystery.
Strauss packs in plenty of hilarious details about the encounters of various PUA's in many different situations, various episodes concerning Mystery and his emotional and mental disturbances, and the events leading up to the collapse of Mystery's ambitious Project Hollywood. Most importantly, Strauss provides his own insightful commentary on all the things the PUA community has completely wrong, namely the misogynistic tendencies of many PUA's, the lack of originality and individual thought amongst PUA's and the complete absence of any "techniques" for staying in healthy, long-term relationships.
Despite Mystery's self-defeating personality, the lawlessness of Project Hollywood and having a large number of PUA's turn against him, Style manages to keep his head on straight and even lands himself the girl of his dreams-without using any seduction techniques (they have quite the opposite effect, actually)!
Even if you don't believe in the powers of the pick-up artist, this book is worth checking out if only for Strauss' wonderful story of developing confidence in himself and finding happiness. And if you do think there is something to this seduction thing, then this book is a good starting point for learning some things and how to not let yourself get carried away.
[Disclosure: This review also appears on [...], a site for review and discussion of creative works.]
I Was Seduced! Jul 20, 2010
Quiet your internal debate about whether or not it's moral to seduce innocent women with geek engineered routines and dime store psychology. Cast aside your objection that this book is not a money-back-guaranteed do-it-yourself guide to making yourself irresistible to every woman that happens to glance in your direction. And don't spend your time trying to figure out whether all of the tales are true or what slice of the pie is exaggerated. None of that matters!
What Neil Strauss has penned is quite simply one of the most engaging and entertaining books I have read in a long time. Conjuring up some of the imagery of Chuck Palinick's pop-culture juggernaught Fight Club (a character who calls himself Tyler Durden, an attempt of like-minded individuals to join together named Project Hollywood, and even a female foil - Katya instead of Marla) and mixed with a little bit of the Matrix (people living in an alternate reality, the difference between knowing the path and walking the pat), Strauss' writing is succienct, slick, and expressive. You quickly get the feeling that he uses just enough words to express his idea and not a single word more. The rhythm of his writing is hypnotic yet uptempo and there was hardly a chapter's end that didn't propel me headlong into the next.
Beyond Strauss' writing acumen, you have a cast of characters that start off as sub-normal misfits and by the end are transformed into surreal, self-styled demagogues, bowing at alters to themselves. However, the transformation is gradual. Strauss does an amazing job of drawing you into his hyper-sexual Wonderland, creating real, dynamic multi-dimensional characters from people that you might otherwise not like and making them likable. As the protagonist, you have an anti-hero who transforms himself into a hero, but for the wrong reasons; his mentor, a tall, skinny, talented wannabe magician with serious intimacy issues and suicidal tendencies; the antagonist, a squirrelly former friend who is a master manipulator; and the love interest, the only woman whom our protagonist cannot charm with his superpowers. And of course, Courtney Love shows up!
If you set aside your assumptions of what this book is supposed to be about, you will find a gem of a story; a story of transformation, a story of love, a story of friendship and a story of overcoming. It's not in the wrapper that you might expect to find it, but it's there... and I enjoyed every page of it.
Can't wait for the movie!
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