cover image Check, Please!: Dating, Mating, & Extricating

Check, Please!: Dating, Mating, & Extricating

Janice Dickinson. ReganBooks, $25.95 (264pp) ISBN 978-0-06-076391-6

Dickinson, the ""world's first supermodel,"" reality TV regular (""America's Next Top Model,"" ""Surreal Life"") and author (this is her fifth book in three years), gets tiresome quickly in this memoir masquerading as a how-to. Despite having dated everybody from Bruce Willis and Mick Jagger to Warren Beatty and Sylvester Stallone, the subject at hand is Dickinson, not dating, a point foreshadowed in her ""Consumer Warning"": ""It'll help you, I promise-but I mean help you the Janice way. I'm no hand-holder."" Vacillating between bitchy tell-all and wicked know-it-all, Dickinson doesn't say much about the dating scene that hasn't been covered in a thousand different places: ""Good sex is great and great sex is phenomenal, but a married man is a dealbreaker. And a heartbreaker."" Funny guy Jon Lovitz's odd foreword establishes the self-obsessed pitch that carries, with little variation, through Dickinson's occasionally amusing chapters on meeting men (""The Pickup""), keeping men (""A Date's Great, but a Relationship Rocks""), juggling men (""Take Two - They're Cheap"") and leaving men (""Extricate Now! Ask Me How""). If you like a good dish, that's precisely what you will get: a standard Hollywood confessional with a strident voice, a self-serving agenda and 16 pages of color photos.