Authors on the Air: Neil Strauss Plays The Game

by Staff, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 9/1/2005

Although many of the major shows devoted the bulk of their air time to coverage of Hurricane Katrina, a number of authors still made it to air. On Talk of the Nation yesterday, Barrett Seaman and Rebekah Nathan weighed in during a back-to-school segment for parents of college students. Seaman, a former reporter and editor at Time magazine, is the author of Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You (John Wiley & Sons, $25.95), a chronicle of the time he spent at a dozen colleges investigating college life. Nathan has written My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student (Cornell University Press, $24). Rebekah Nathan is a pseudonym for a fifty-something-year-old anthropology professor who enrolled for a year at the university where she teaches to try and understand the behavior and attitudes of her students.

On Late Night with Conan O'Brien this evening, it will be a slam dunk for Len Berman as he entertains with stories from Spanning the World: The Crazy Universe of Big-Time Sports, All-Star Egos, and Hall of Fame Bloopers (William Morrow, $25.95).

Tomorrow on the View, Neil Strauss will take viewers inside The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (ReganBooks, $29.95). Amy Sohn, who reviewed the book for PW, had this to say: "A few years ago, a distraught Strauss decided he was a loser with women and set about transforming himself into the world's greatest pick-up artist. The Game is his long, often tedious but hilarious account of how he did it. This ugly-duckling tale will affect different readers in different ways, depending on their degree of cynicism: some will be awed by Strauss's menage-a-trois snowball scene, while others will suspect it was cribbed from a third-rate porno Strauss watched in his pre-macking days…. He is also, it should be noted, a well-known rock critic who penned porn star Jenna Jameson's autobiography, leaving one wondering just how pathetic women really found him."

For more detailed information about author appearances on these shows and others as well as listings of book mentions and book reviews, see Motor Online. The service monitors nationally broadcast TV and radio programs and develops comprehensive listings of books, music, magazines, videos, film and software featured on more than 60 programs. For more information on these titles, click here.

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