Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Several months ago I published a review of this book and just as a food critic will dine at a restaurant several times before publishing his review, I decided to take another look at Robert Green's controversial, "The Art of Seduction". Subsequent to my first encounter with the book, I panned it based on moral grounds, using as justification the words of Greene himself: "Seducers are completely amoral in their approach to life." This is one of the fundamental premises of Greene's book and ironically--or ignorantly--he contradicts himself by counting among masters of the art of seduction numerous individuals who clearly were not amoral. One such example is Benjamin Disraeli, the first Jewish Prime Minister of Great Britiain who labored on behalf of wheat farmers who were being vicitimized by the aristocracy, instituted social reforms in health care and public safety, sought to improve conditions for factory workers and to improve living conditions for laborers as well as empower workers to bring suit against employers for breach of contract. These are hardly the characteristics of "amorality" that Greene says is an a priori orientation of the seducer to life. Anothe master of the art, according to Greene, was Josephine Baker, who in addition to adopting nine children, was involved while in France in the civil rights movement in the United States. Again, such personal characteristics are not those displayed by the individual lacking a moral compass. Consequently, when Greene makes such a sweeping generalization and declares it to be an essential characteristic of the seducer and then impeaches his own argument, is it unreasonable to suggest that other "givens" may be equally flawed? Those of us inclined to dismiss this book with one or two stars have various reasons for doing so. The fatal flaw in Greeene's treatise, in my opinion, is the individuals he holds up as icons of the art of seduction. Randomly scan the index at the end of the book and you will discover that between the covers there is a "who's who" of history's most famous characters. Greene's masterful seducers are far and away men and women counted among the aristocrats, nobility, powerful, wealthy, and most influential people of their time. He is particularly enamored with Casanova, who at 21 found a patron in an influential Senator--a stroke of luck which allowed him to live the life of a nobleman. Casanova had a few bad years and reflecting on them said, "I saw that to accomplish anything I must bring all my physical and moral faculties in play, make the acquaintance of the great and the powerful, exercise strict self-control, and play the chameleon." He latched on to a new patron, an old friend who was the Foreign Minister of France." Again and again and again, Greene cites examples of seducers who he describes as either uncommonly good-looking, having some sort of status lesser mortals don't, and whose existence is so alien to that which most of us must endure, the discerning reader will be compelled to admit that the strategies these individuals employed to affect their seductions were in large part due to their social status and not strategy flawlessly executed. As one example he cites the Aga Khan's pursuit of Rita Hayworth. The Aga Khan, of course, is one of the world's wealthiest men and as social scientists have discovered, money covers a lot of sins. In one experiment three men were assessed by women as to their physical attractiveness. The first--on a scale of 10--was rated a "2", the second, a "5", and the third a "10". Then the researchers told the woman the "5" was an IT/Softwhere developer who made $150,000 a year. His rating jumped to an eight. The "2", the women were told, owned his own company and made $350,000 a year. He became a "9". The devishly good-looking "10" was said to be a clerk in a retail store and was consequently downgraded to a "2". I've been told I'm a "7" and on my very best days and in the right light, with the cooperation of other favorable circumstances, I might "punch above my weight class" and flirt with an "8". My "intangibles" are fairly solid. I'm told I have a good sense of humor, can put people at ease, and play well with people. Still in all, I'm not likely to approach a woman like Bar Rafell with much confidence. Give me a net worth of $800,000,000, make me a Senator or a well-known Broadway producer and I like my chances. Greene, in his acounts of the seductions of the overwhelming majority of his master seducers chalks their success to strategy and completely dismisses status and other variables--one, for example, being that our sexual attractiveness to a particular individual has been demonstrated in replicated studies to be dictated by the hardwiring of our brains). This ommission to include pertinent, solid research on seduction reduces "The Art of Seduction" to a theory Greene trots out predicated on anecdotal evidence. If we are honest with ourselves, we know intuitively that it is status, physical attractiveness, power and similar attributes, and not strategy, that grease the wheels of seduction and the mass of humanity who do not possess such advantages are going to have to work a lot harder--most often only to be disappointed--to get the girl or guy coveted by those who possess these assets. Yes, there are exceptions. I would have found this book much more worthwhile had Greene told stories of "commoners" like most of us are who beat the odds rather than, let's say, the less than inspiring and irrelevant account of the Aga Khan's persistance in pursuing Rita Hayworth by bringing her to his palatial mansion and squiring her to Paris, won her over. It is Green's M.O. to recount such stories and then fit them into his theories of seduction, which, I admit in many cases, I believe to be arbitrary constructions. Greene declares there are nine seductive characters but there is not a single footnote or citation to validate this assumption. Remarkably, for a book of 454 pages, the bibliography is astonishingly short--a mere two pages. Similarly, he codifies the strategems to employ in the practice of seduction into 24 tactics which are to be employed on 18 types of victims. This is where Greene really goes off into the tall grass. By way of example, let's say the object of your lust is a victim-type Greene classifies as "An Idol Worshipper". Greene says the way to snare this prey is to "simply become their object of worship". Worship? Most of us have to apply a degree of cunning and invest considerable sweat equity just to get somebody's phone number and Greene is telling us it is a simple matter to get someone to worship us? I could write a sizeable book on the leaps of logic, baseless assumptions, and risks involved in Greene's advice. Think for a moment on the permutations: nine seductive characters each having 18 types of potential victims for which you could use any of 24 different strategies. At the end of the day, there is some sound advice here: be patient, listen more than talk, observe--the basics. But this book is so bloated with conjecture and countless accounts Greene draws from history that it's probably better in the long run to just run through the numbers. If you're attracted to someone, screw up your courage, smile, say "Hi, I typically don't do this but if I didn't make some attempt to meet you, I'd spend the rest of the day regretting it." A final note: some have applauded the book because they believe has done a great service in helping them see how some people manipulate others: fair enough--but that's not what Greene promises in the first page of his book" "We all have the power to draw people in and hold them in our thrall."--that is, we all have the power to control the way people will respond to us to such a degree we can hijack their freedom of choice if we play specific head games. If that was true, Greene would be as rich as the Aga Khan for breaking a code that Casanova himself confessed often completely baffled him.